• A short history of the roadblock

    Barricades, as we know them today, are thought to date back to the European wars of religion. According to most historians, the first barricade went up in Paris in 1588; the word derives from the French barriques, or barrels, spontaneously put together. They have been assembled from the most diverse materials, from cobblestones, tyres, newspapers, dead horses and bags of ice, to omnibuses and e‑scooters. Their tactical logic is close to that of guerrilla warfare: the authorities have to take the barricades in order to claim victory; all that those manning them have to do to prevail is to hold them. 
    The 19th century was the golden age for blocking narrow, labyrinthine streets. Paris had seen barricades go up nine times in the period before the Second Empire; during the July 1830 Revolution alone, 4,000 barricades had been erected. These barricades would not only stop, but also trap troops; people would then throw stones from windows or pour boiling water onto the streets. Georges‑Eugène Haussmann, Napoleon III’s prefect of Paris, famously created wide boulevards to make blocking by barricade more difficult and moving the military easier, and replaced cobblestones with macadam – a surface of crushed stone. As Flaubert observed in his Dictionary of Accepted Ideas: ‘Macadam: has cancelled revolutions. No more means to make barricades. Nevertheless rather inconvenient.’  
    Lead image: Barricades, as we know them today, are thought to have originated in early modern France. A colour engraving attributed to Achille‑Louis Martinet depicts the defence of a barricade during the 1830 July Revolution. Credit: Paris Musées / Musée Carnavalet – Histoire de Paris. Above: the socialist political thinker and activist Louis Auguste Blanqui – who was imprisoned by every regime that ruled France between 1815 and 1880 – drew instructions for how to build an effective barricade

    Under Napoleon III, Baron Haussmann widened Paris’s streets in his 1853–70 renovation of the city, making barricading more difficult
    Credit: Old Books Images / Alamy
    ‘On one hand,wanted to favour the circulation of ideas,’ reactionary intellectual Louis Veuillot observed apropos the ambiguous liberalism of the latter period of Napoleon III’s Second Empire. ‘On the other, to ensure the circulation of regiments.’ But ‘anti‑insurgency hardware’, as Justinien Tribillon has called it, also served to chase the working class out of the city centre: Haussmann’s projects amounted to a gigantic form of real-estate speculation, and the 1871 Paris Commune that followed constituted not just a short‑lived anarchist experiment featuring enormous barricades; it also signalled the return of the workers to the centre and, arguably, revenge for their dispossession.   
    By the mid‑19th century, observers questioned whether barricades still had practical meaning. Gottfried Semper’s barricade, constructed for the 1849 Dresden uprising, had proved unconquerable, but Friedrich Engels, one‑time ‘inspector of barricades’ in the Elberfeld insurrection of the same year, already suggested that the barricades’ primary meaning was now moral rather than military – a point to be echoed by Leon Trotsky in the subsequent century. Barricades symbolised bravery and the will to hold out among insurrectionists, and, not least, determination rather to destroy one’s possessions – and one’s neighbourhood – than put up with further oppression.  
    Not only self‑declared revolutionaries viewed things this way: the reformist Social Democrat leader Eduard Bernstein observed that ‘the barricade fight as a political weapon of the people has been completely eliminated due to changes in weapon technology and cities’ structures’. Bernstein was also picking up on the fact that, in the era of industrialisation, contention happened at least as much on the factory floor as on the streets. The strike, not the food riot or the defence of workers’ quartiers, became the paradigmatic form of conflict. Joshua Clover has pointed out in his 2016 book Riot. Strike. Riot: The New Era of Uprisings, that the price of labour, rather than the price of goods, caused people to confront the powerful. Blocking production grew more important than blocking the street.
    ‘The only weapons we have are our bodies, and we need to tuck them in places so wheels don’t turn’
    Today, it is again blocking – not just people streaming along the streets in large marches – that is prominently associated with protests. Disrupting circulation is not only an important gesture in the face of climate emergency; blocking transport is a powerful form of protest in an economic system focused on logistics and just‑in‑time distribution. Members of Insulate Britain and Germany’s Last Generation super‑glue themselves to streets to stop car traffic to draw attention to the climate emergency; they have also attached themselves to airport runways. They form a human barricade of sorts, immobilising traffic by making themselves immovable.  
    Today’s protesters have made themselves consciously vulnerable. They in fact follow the advice of US civil rights’ Bayard Rustin who explained: ‘The only weapons we have are our bodies, and we need to tuck them in places so wheels don’t turn.’ Making oneself vulnerable might increase the chances of a majority of citizens seeing the importance of the cause which those engaged in civil disobedience are pursuing. Demonstrations – even large, unpredictable ones – are no longer sufficient. They draw too little attention and do not compel a reaction. Naomi Klein proposed the term ‘blockadia’ as ‘a roving transnational conflict zone’ in which people block extraction – be it open‑pit mines, fracking sites or tar sands pipelines – with their bodies. More often than not, these blockades are organised by local people opposing the fossil fuel industry, not environmental activists per se. Blockadia came to denote resistance to the Keystone XL pipeline as well as Canada’s First Nations‑led movement Idle No More.
    In cities, blocking can be accomplished with highly mobile structures. Like the barricade of the 19th century, they can be quickly assembled, yet are difficult to move; unlike old‑style barricades, they can also be quickly disassembled, removed and hidden. Think of super tripods, intricate ‘protest beacons’ based on tensegrity principles, as well as inflatable cobblestones, pioneered by the artist‑activists of Tools for Action.  
    As recently as 1991, newly independent Latvia defended itself against Soviet tanks with the popular construction of barricades, in a series of confrontations that became known as the Barikādes
    Credit: Associated Press / Alamy
    Inversely, roadblocks can be used by police authorities to stop demonstrations and gatherings from taking place – protesters are seen removing such infrastructure in Dhaka during a general strike in 1999
    Credit: REUTERS / Rafiqur Rahman / Bridgeman
    These inflatable objects are highly flexible, but can also be protective against police batons. They pose an awkward challenge to the authorities, who often end up looking ridiculous when dealing with them, and, as one of the inventors pointed out, they are guaranteed to create a media spectacle. This was also true of the 19th‑century barricade: people posed for pictures in front of them. As Wolfgang Scheppe, a curator of Architecture of the Barricade, explains, these images helped the police to find Communards and mete out punishments after the end of the anarchist experiment.
    Much simpler structures can also be highly effective. In 2019, protesters in Hong Kong filled streets with little archways made from just three ordinary bricks: two standing upright, one resting on top. When touched, the falling top one would buttress the other two, and effectively block traffic. In line with their imperative of ‘be water’, protesters would retreat when the police appeared, but the ‘mini‑Stonehenges’ would remain and slow down the authorities.
    Today, elaborate architectures of protest, such as Extinction Rebellion’s ‘tensegrity towers’, are used to blockade roads and distribution networks – in this instance, Rupert Murdoch’s News UK printworks in Broxbourne, for the media group’s failure to report the climate emergency accurately
    Credit: Extinction Rebellion
    In June 2025, protests erupted in Los Angeles against the Trump administration’s deportation policies. Demonstrators barricaded downtown streets using various objects, including the pink public furniture designed by design firm Rios for Gloria Molina Grand Park. LAPD are seen advancing through tear gas
    Credit: Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
    Roads which radicals might want to target are not just ones in major metropoles and fancy post‑industrial downtowns. Rather, they might block the arteries leading to ‘fulfilment centres’ and harbours with container shipping. The model is not only Occupy Wall Street, which had initially called for the erection of ‘peaceful barricades’, but also the Occupy that led to the Oakland port shutdown in 2011. In short, such roadblocks disrupt what Phil Neel has called a ‘hinterland’ that is often invisible, yet crucial for contemporary capitalism. More recently, Extinction Rebellion targeted Amazon distribution centres in three European countries in November 2021; in the UK, they aimed to disrupt half of all deliveries on a Black Friday.  
    Will such blockades just anger consumers who, after all, are not present but are impatiently waiting for packages at home? One of the hopes associated with the traditional barricade was always that they might create spaces where protesters, police and previously indifferent citizens get talking; French theorists even expected them to become ‘a machine to produce the people’. That could be why military technology has evolved so that the authorities do not have to get close to the barricade: tear gas was first deployed against those on barricades before it was used in the First World War; so‑called riot control vehicles can ever more easily crush barricades. The challenge, then, for anyone who wishes to block is also how to get in other people’s faces – in order to have a chance to convince them of their cause.       

    2025-06-11
    Kristina Rapacki

    Share
    #short #history #roadblock
    A short history of the roadblock
    Barricades, as we know them today, are thought to date back to the European wars of religion. According to most historians, the first barricade went up in Paris in 1588; the word derives from the French barriques, or barrels, spontaneously put together. They have been assembled from the most diverse materials, from cobblestones, tyres, newspapers, dead horses and bags of ice, to omnibuses and e‑scooters. Their tactical logic is close to that of guerrilla warfare: the authorities have to take the barricades in order to claim victory; all that those manning them have to do to prevail is to hold them.  The 19th century was the golden age for blocking narrow, labyrinthine streets. Paris had seen barricades go up nine times in the period before the Second Empire; during the July 1830 Revolution alone, 4,000 barricades had been erected. These barricades would not only stop, but also trap troops; people would then throw stones from windows or pour boiling water onto the streets. Georges‑Eugène Haussmann, Napoleon III’s prefect of Paris, famously created wide boulevards to make blocking by barricade more difficult and moving the military easier, and replaced cobblestones with macadam – a surface of crushed stone. As Flaubert observed in his Dictionary of Accepted Ideas: ‘Macadam: has cancelled revolutions. No more means to make barricades. Nevertheless rather inconvenient.’   Lead image: Barricades, as we know them today, are thought to have originated in early modern France. A colour engraving attributed to Achille‑Louis Martinet depicts the defence of a barricade during the 1830 July Revolution. Credit: Paris Musées / Musée Carnavalet – Histoire de Paris. Above: the socialist political thinker and activist Louis Auguste Blanqui – who was imprisoned by every regime that ruled France between 1815 and 1880 – drew instructions for how to build an effective barricade Under Napoleon III, Baron Haussmann widened Paris’s streets in his 1853–70 renovation of the city, making barricading more difficult Credit: Old Books Images / Alamy ‘On one hand,wanted to favour the circulation of ideas,’ reactionary intellectual Louis Veuillot observed apropos the ambiguous liberalism of the latter period of Napoleon III’s Second Empire. ‘On the other, to ensure the circulation of regiments.’ But ‘anti‑insurgency hardware’, as Justinien Tribillon has called it, also served to chase the working class out of the city centre: Haussmann’s projects amounted to a gigantic form of real-estate speculation, and the 1871 Paris Commune that followed constituted not just a short‑lived anarchist experiment featuring enormous barricades; it also signalled the return of the workers to the centre and, arguably, revenge for their dispossession.    By the mid‑19th century, observers questioned whether barricades still had practical meaning. Gottfried Semper’s barricade, constructed for the 1849 Dresden uprising, had proved unconquerable, but Friedrich Engels, one‑time ‘inspector of barricades’ in the Elberfeld insurrection of the same year, already suggested that the barricades’ primary meaning was now moral rather than military – a point to be echoed by Leon Trotsky in the subsequent century. Barricades symbolised bravery and the will to hold out among insurrectionists, and, not least, determination rather to destroy one’s possessions – and one’s neighbourhood – than put up with further oppression.   Not only self‑declared revolutionaries viewed things this way: the reformist Social Democrat leader Eduard Bernstein observed that ‘the barricade fight as a political weapon of the people has been completely eliminated due to changes in weapon technology and cities’ structures’. Bernstein was also picking up on the fact that, in the era of industrialisation, contention happened at least as much on the factory floor as on the streets. The strike, not the food riot or the defence of workers’ quartiers, became the paradigmatic form of conflict. Joshua Clover has pointed out in his 2016 book Riot. Strike. Riot: The New Era of Uprisings, that the price of labour, rather than the price of goods, caused people to confront the powerful. Blocking production grew more important than blocking the street. ‘The only weapons we have are our bodies, and we need to tuck them in places so wheels don’t turn’ Today, it is again blocking – not just people streaming along the streets in large marches – that is prominently associated with protests. Disrupting circulation is not only an important gesture in the face of climate emergency; blocking transport is a powerful form of protest in an economic system focused on logistics and just‑in‑time distribution. Members of Insulate Britain and Germany’s Last Generation super‑glue themselves to streets to stop car traffic to draw attention to the climate emergency; they have also attached themselves to airport runways. They form a human barricade of sorts, immobilising traffic by making themselves immovable.   Today’s protesters have made themselves consciously vulnerable. They in fact follow the advice of US civil rights’ Bayard Rustin who explained: ‘The only weapons we have are our bodies, and we need to tuck them in places so wheels don’t turn.’ Making oneself vulnerable might increase the chances of a majority of citizens seeing the importance of the cause which those engaged in civil disobedience are pursuing. Demonstrations – even large, unpredictable ones – are no longer sufficient. They draw too little attention and do not compel a reaction. Naomi Klein proposed the term ‘blockadia’ as ‘a roving transnational conflict zone’ in which people block extraction – be it open‑pit mines, fracking sites or tar sands pipelines – with their bodies. More often than not, these blockades are organised by local people opposing the fossil fuel industry, not environmental activists per se. Blockadia came to denote resistance to the Keystone XL pipeline as well as Canada’s First Nations‑led movement Idle No More. In cities, blocking can be accomplished with highly mobile structures. Like the barricade of the 19th century, they can be quickly assembled, yet are difficult to move; unlike old‑style barricades, they can also be quickly disassembled, removed and hidden. Think of super tripods, intricate ‘protest beacons’ based on tensegrity principles, as well as inflatable cobblestones, pioneered by the artist‑activists of Tools for Action.   As recently as 1991, newly independent Latvia defended itself against Soviet tanks with the popular construction of barricades, in a series of confrontations that became known as the Barikādes Credit: Associated Press / Alamy Inversely, roadblocks can be used by police authorities to stop demonstrations and gatherings from taking place – protesters are seen removing such infrastructure in Dhaka during a general strike in 1999 Credit: REUTERS / Rafiqur Rahman / Bridgeman These inflatable objects are highly flexible, but can also be protective against police batons. They pose an awkward challenge to the authorities, who often end up looking ridiculous when dealing with them, and, as one of the inventors pointed out, they are guaranteed to create a media spectacle. This was also true of the 19th‑century barricade: people posed for pictures in front of them. As Wolfgang Scheppe, a curator of Architecture of the Barricade, explains, these images helped the police to find Communards and mete out punishments after the end of the anarchist experiment. Much simpler structures can also be highly effective. In 2019, protesters in Hong Kong filled streets with little archways made from just three ordinary bricks: two standing upright, one resting on top. When touched, the falling top one would buttress the other two, and effectively block traffic. In line with their imperative of ‘be water’, protesters would retreat when the police appeared, but the ‘mini‑Stonehenges’ would remain and slow down the authorities. Today, elaborate architectures of protest, such as Extinction Rebellion’s ‘tensegrity towers’, are used to blockade roads and distribution networks – in this instance, Rupert Murdoch’s News UK printworks in Broxbourne, for the media group’s failure to report the climate emergency accurately Credit: Extinction Rebellion In June 2025, protests erupted in Los Angeles against the Trump administration’s deportation policies. Demonstrators barricaded downtown streets using various objects, including the pink public furniture designed by design firm Rios for Gloria Molina Grand Park. LAPD are seen advancing through tear gas Credit: Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images Roads which radicals might want to target are not just ones in major metropoles and fancy post‑industrial downtowns. Rather, they might block the arteries leading to ‘fulfilment centres’ and harbours with container shipping. The model is not only Occupy Wall Street, which had initially called for the erection of ‘peaceful barricades’, but also the Occupy that led to the Oakland port shutdown in 2011. In short, such roadblocks disrupt what Phil Neel has called a ‘hinterland’ that is often invisible, yet crucial for contemporary capitalism. More recently, Extinction Rebellion targeted Amazon distribution centres in three European countries in November 2021; in the UK, they aimed to disrupt half of all deliveries on a Black Friday.   Will such blockades just anger consumers who, after all, are not present but are impatiently waiting for packages at home? One of the hopes associated with the traditional barricade was always that they might create spaces where protesters, police and previously indifferent citizens get talking; French theorists even expected them to become ‘a machine to produce the people’. That could be why military technology has evolved so that the authorities do not have to get close to the barricade: tear gas was first deployed against those on barricades before it was used in the First World War; so‑called riot control vehicles can ever more easily crush barricades. The challenge, then, for anyone who wishes to block is also how to get in other people’s faces – in order to have a chance to convince them of their cause.        2025-06-11 Kristina Rapacki Share #short #history #roadblock
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    A short history of the roadblock
    Barricades, as we know them today, are thought to date back to the European wars of religion. According to most historians, the first barricade went up in Paris in 1588; the word derives from the French barriques, or barrels, spontaneously put together. They have been assembled from the most diverse materials, from cobblestones, tyres, newspapers, dead horses and bags of ice (during Kyiv’s Euromaidan in 2013–14), to omnibuses and e‑scooters. Their tactical logic is close to that of guerrilla warfare: the authorities have to take the barricades in order to claim victory; all that those manning them have to do to prevail is to hold them.  The 19th century was the golden age for blocking narrow, labyrinthine streets. Paris had seen barricades go up nine times in the period before the Second Empire; during the July 1830 Revolution alone, 4,000 barricades had been erected (roughly one for every 200 Parisians). These barricades would not only stop, but also trap troops; people would then throw stones from windows or pour boiling water onto the streets. Georges‑Eugène Haussmann, Napoleon III’s prefect of Paris, famously created wide boulevards to make blocking by barricade more difficult and moving the military easier, and replaced cobblestones with macadam – a surface of crushed stone. As Flaubert observed in his Dictionary of Accepted Ideas: ‘Macadam: has cancelled revolutions. No more means to make barricades. Nevertheless rather inconvenient.’   Lead image: Barricades, as we know them today, are thought to have originated in early modern France. A colour engraving attributed to Achille‑Louis Martinet depicts the defence of a barricade during the 1830 July Revolution. Credit: Paris Musées / Musée Carnavalet – Histoire de Paris. Above: the socialist political thinker and activist Louis Auguste Blanqui – who was imprisoned by every regime that ruled France between 1815 and 1880 – drew instructions for how to build an effective barricade Under Napoleon III, Baron Haussmann widened Paris’s streets in his 1853–70 renovation of the city, making barricading more difficult Credit: Old Books Images / Alamy ‘On one hand, [the authorities] wanted to favour the circulation of ideas,’ reactionary intellectual Louis Veuillot observed apropos the ambiguous liberalism of the latter period of Napoleon III’s Second Empire. ‘On the other, to ensure the circulation of regiments.’ But ‘anti‑insurgency hardware’, as Justinien Tribillon has called it, also served to chase the working class out of the city centre: Haussmann’s projects amounted to a gigantic form of real-estate speculation, and the 1871 Paris Commune that followed constituted not just a short‑lived anarchist experiment featuring enormous barricades; it also signalled the return of the workers to the centre and, arguably, revenge for their dispossession.    By the mid‑19th century, observers questioned whether barricades still had practical meaning. Gottfried Semper’s barricade, constructed for the 1849 Dresden uprising, had proved unconquerable, but Friedrich Engels, one‑time ‘inspector of barricades’ in the Elberfeld insurrection of the same year, already suggested that the barricades’ primary meaning was now moral rather than military – a point to be echoed by Leon Trotsky in the subsequent century. Barricades symbolised bravery and the will to hold out among insurrectionists, and, not least, determination rather to destroy one’s possessions – and one’s neighbourhood – than put up with further oppression.   Not only self‑declared revolutionaries viewed things this way: the reformist Social Democrat leader Eduard Bernstein observed that ‘the barricade fight as a political weapon of the people has been completely eliminated due to changes in weapon technology and cities’ structures’. Bernstein was also picking up on the fact that, in the era of industrialisation, contention happened at least as much on the factory floor as on the streets. The strike, not the food riot or the defence of workers’ quartiers, became the paradigmatic form of conflict. Joshua Clover has pointed out in his 2016 book Riot. Strike. Riot: The New Era of Uprisings, that the price of labour, rather than the price of goods, caused people to confront the powerful. Blocking production grew more important than blocking the street. ‘The only weapons we have are our bodies, and we need to tuck them in places so wheels don’t turn’ Today, it is again blocking – not just people streaming along the streets in large marches – that is prominently associated with protests. Disrupting circulation is not only an important gesture in the face of climate emergency; blocking transport is a powerful form of protest in an economic system focused on logistics and just‑in‑time distribution. Members of Insulate Britain and Germany’s Last Generation super‑glue themselves to streets to stop car traffic to draw attention to the climate emergency; they have also attached themselves to airport runways. They form a human barricade of sorts, immobilising traffic by making themselves immovable.   Today’s protesters have made themselves consciously vulnerable. They in fact follow the advice of US civil rights’ Bayard Rustin who explained: ‘The only weapons we have are our bodies, and we need to tuck them in places so wheels don’t turn.’ Making oneself vulnerable might increase the chances of a majority of citizens seeing the importance of the cause which those engaged in civil disobedience are pursuing. Demonstrations – even large, unpredictable ones – are no longer sufficient. They draw too little attention and do not compel a reaction. Naomi Klein proposed the term ‘blockadia’ as ‘a roving transnational conflict zone’ in which people block extraction – be it open‑pit mines, fracking sites or tar sands pipelines – with their bodies. More often than not, these blockades are organised by local people opposing the fossil fuel industry, not environmental activists per se. Blockadia came to denote resistance to the Keystone XL pipeline as well as Canada’s First Nations‑led movement Idle No More. In cities, blocking can be accomplished with highly mobile structures. Like the barricade of the 19th century, they can be quickly assembled, yet are difficult to move; unlike old‑style barricades, they can also be quickly disassembled, removed and hidden (by those who have the engineering and architectural know‑how). Think of super tripods, intricate ‘protest beacons’ based on tensegrity principles, as well as inflatable cobblestones, pioneered by the artist‑activists of Tools for Action (and as analysed in Nick Newman’s recent volume Protest Architecture).   As recently as 1991, newly independent Latvia defended itself against Soviet tanks with the popular construction of barricades, in a series of confrontations that became known as the Barikādes Credit: Associated Press / Alamy Inversely, roadblocks can be used by police authorities to stop demonstrations and gatherings from taking place – protesters are seen removing such infrastructure in Dhaka during a general strike in 1999 Credit: REUTERS / Rafiqur Rahman / Bridgeman These inflatable objects are highly flexible, but can also be protective against police batons. They pose an awkward challenge to the authorities, who often end up looking ridiculous when dealing with them, and, as one of the inventors pointed out, they are guaranteed to create a media spectacle. This was also true of the 19th‑century barricade: people posed for pictures in front of them. As Wolfgang Scheppe, a curator of Architecture of the Barricade (currently on display at the Arsenale Institute for Politics of Representation in Venice), explains, these images helped the police to find Communards and mete out punishments after the end of the anarchist experiment. Much simpler structures can also be highly effective. In 2019, protesters in Hong Kong filled streets with little archways made from just three ordinary bricks: two standing upright, one resting on top. When touched, the falling top one would buttress the other two, and effectively block traffic. In line with their imperative of ‘be water’, protesters would retreat when the police appeared, but the ‘mini‑Stonehenges’ would remain and slow down the authorities. Today, elaborate architectures of protest, such as Extinction Rebellion’s ‘tensegrity towers’, are used to blockade roads and distribution networks – in this instance, Rupert Murdoch’s News UK printworks in Broxbourne, for the media group’s failure to report the climate emergency accurately Credit: Extinction Rebellion In June 2025, protests erupted in Los Angeles against the Trump administration’s deportation policies. Demonstrators barricaded downtown streets using various objects, including the pink public furniture designed by design firm Rios for Gloria Molina Grand Park. LAPD are seen advancing through tear gas Credit: Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images Roads which radicals might want to target are not just ones in major metropoles and fancy post‑industrial downtowns. Rather, they might block the arteries leading to ‘fulfilment centres’ and harbours with container shipping. The model is not only Occupy Wall Street, which had initially called for the erection of ‘peaceful barricades’, but also the Occupy that led to the Oakland port shutdown in 2011. In short, such roadblocks disrupt what Phil Neel has called a ‘hinterland’ that is often invisible, yet crucial for contemporary capitalism. More recently, Extinction Rebellion targeted Amazon distribution centres in three European countries in November 2021; in the UK, they aimed to disrupt half of all deliveries on a Black Friday.   Will such blockades just anger consumers who, after all, are not present but are impatiently waiting for packages at home? One of the hopes associated with the traditional barricade was always that they might create spaces where protesters, police and previously indifferent citizens get talking; French theorists even expected them to become ‘a machine to produce the people’. That could be why military technology has evolved so that the authorities do not have to get close to the barricade: tear gas was first deployed against those on barricades before it was used in the First World War; so‑called riot control vehicles can ever more easily crush barricades. The challenge, then, for anyone who wishes to block is also how to get in other people’s faces – in order to have a chance to convince them of their cause.        2025-06-11 Kristina Rapacki Share
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  • The Elden Ring movie director already made the best video game-brained movie

    A rumored Elden Ring movie became a little more of a reality on Thursday night when Bandai Namco announced that Alex Garlandwas set to direct a film adaptation of the FromSoftware action role-playing-game for indie-studio darling A24. George R.R. Martin, who provided game director Hidetaka Miyazaki with a murky amount of mythological foundation for the original game, will serve as a producer on the film.

    Garland might look like an odd choice for Elden Ring based on his filmography; the writer-director has never made a fantasy epic, nor has he orchestrated the kind of medieval combat that would make him an obvious choice to bring Miyazaki’s tough-as-hell boss fights to live action. But Garland’s “gamer cred” is indisputable and an understanding of play is core to much of his work. Hot take time: I’d say his 2012 film Dredd is the greatest video game movie that isn’t actually based on a video game ever made.

    Starting out as a novelist before pivoting to screenwriting and directing, Garland has made his gaming inspirations known throughout his career. He has said that his time outrunning zombie dogs in Resident Evil was the direct inspiration for the fast zombies in 28 Days Later, which he wrote for director Danny Boyle. When he and Boyle teamed up to adapt Garland’s own novel, The Beach, the collaboration resulted in the closest thing we will ever get to Leonardo DiCaprio’s Banjo-Kazooie movie.

    In 2005, riding high off 28 Days Later’s success, Garland was tasked by Microsoft with adapting Halo into a feature film — a project that stalled out and sat on a shelf for so long that streaming television was invented and Halo became a decent Paramount Plus show instead. He also went on to collaborate on actual video games: He worked with Ninja Theory and Bandai Namco on 2010’s Enslaved: Odyssey to the West, and he served as a story supervisor on 2013’s DmC: Devil May Cry. At some point around that time, he played and fell hard for The Last of Us.Garland’s gaming tastes are all over the map — in 2020 he aggressively kept up an Animal Crossing island like the rest of us — but his visible influences veer toward the AAA action experience. His adaptation of Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation has the pace and encounters of an open-world game. His FX show Devs seems right up the alley of anyone looking for Deus Ex or Control vibes. Both Civil War and his 2025 film Warfare bring audiences closer to the kind of tactical military action that we rarely see in movies, but that is all over multiplayer shooters. But for my money, his off-the-leash translation of video game aesthetics and experience in cinematic form happened with Dredd.

    Written and produced by Garland and technically directed by Pete Travis, Dredd drops the classic 2000 AD comic antihero, played by The Boys’ Karl Urban, into a The Raid-esque action scenario: To stop a violent drug lord, the Judge must blast his way through 200 stories of a highly barricaded Mega-City One high-rise. Between the slo-mo effects induced by the illicit drugand the psychic abilities of Dredd’s sidekick Cassandra, Dredd is a dizzying array of action beats that plunges viewers into a bullet hell without resorting to any gimmicky first-person shooting.

    By all accounts, the making of Dredd was a fraught experience for all involved, with the studio losing enough faith in Travis that Garland remained on set for the entire shoot and supervised the edit. Urban even claims Garland “actually directed the movie.” When you see it, that makes sense — even the Slo-Mo effects feel specifically like a bullet-time mechanic rather than a complete acid trip.

    Will Garland make a great Elden Ring movie? What does that even look like? The good news is he’s probably been thinking about it for years, as a fan of FromSoft games. In interviews over the years, the filmmaker has cited Dark Souls as a particular favorite franchise, and even offered an explanation for why an adaptation would be such a challenge.

    “The Dark Souls games seem to have this embedded poetry in them,” Garland told Gamespot in 2020. “You’ll be wandering around and find some weird bit of dialogue with some sort of broken song with a bit of armor outside a doorway and it feels like you’ve drifted into some existential dream. That’s what I really love about Dark Souls. These spaces are so imaginative and they seem to flow into each other and flow out of each other. It’s very dreamlikeI can’t imagine how that would. The quality that makes Dark Souls special is probably unique to video games.”

    The joy Garland finds in Dark Souls games isn’t far off from what Elden Ring offers him as a director — in the end, a successful adaptation will ride on mood and pace and some wicked fights. That’s what Dredd nails, even without a game as actual source material. Dredd broods without relying on too much exposition. Cassandra’s ethereal psychic powers thread a bit of innocence and whimsy into a heavy-metal dystopia. The action is brutal to the point that it often feels like a horror movie. 

    “Elden Ring from the guy who brought us Dredd” makes a lot of sense. Now to find an actor with eight arms…
    #elden #ring #movie #director #already
    The Elden Ring movie director already made the best video game-brained movie
    A rumored Elden Ring movie became a little more of a reality on Thursday night when Bandai Namco announced that Alex Garlandwas set to direct a film adaptation of the FromSoftware action role-playing-game for indie-studio darling A24. George R.R. Martin, who provided game director Hidetaka Miyazaki with a murky amount of mythological foundation for the original game, will serve as a producer on the film. Garland might look like an odd choice for Elden Ring based on his filmography; the writer-director has never made a fantasy epic, nor has he orchestrated the kind of medieval combat that would make him an obvious choice to bring Miyazaki’s tough-as-hell boss fights to live action. But Garland’s “gamer cred” is indisputable and an understanding of play is core to much of his work. Hot take time: I’d say his 2012 film Dredd is the greatest video game movie that isn’t actually based on a video game ever made. Starting out as a novelist before pivoting to screenwriting and directing, Garland has made his gaming inspirations known throughout his career. He has said that his time outrunning zombie dogs in Resident Evil was the direct inspiration for the fast zombies in 28 Days Later, which he wrote for director Danny Boyle. When he and Boyle teamed up to adapt Garland’s own novel, The Beach, the collaboration resulted in the closest thing we will ever get to Leonardo DiCaprio’s Banjo-Kazooie movie. In 2005, riding high off 28 Days Later’s success, Garland was tasked by Microsoft with adapting Halo into a feature film — a project that stalled out and sat on a shelf for so long that streaming television was invented and Halo became a decent Paramount Plus show instead. He also went on to collaborate on actual video games: He worked with Ninja Theory and Bandai Namco on 2010’s Enslaved: Odyssey to the West, and he served as a story supervisor on 2013’s DmC: Devil May Cry. At some point around that time, he played and fell hard for The Last of Us.Garland’s gaming tastes are all over the map — in 2020 he aggressively kept up an Animal Crossing island like the rest of us — but his visible influences veer toward the AAA action experience. His adaptation of Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation has the pace and encounters of an open-world game. His FX show Devs seems right up the alley of anyone looking for Deus Ex or Control vibes. Both Civil War and his 2025 film Warfare bring audiences closer to the kind of tactical military action that we rarely see in movies, but that is all over multiplayer shooters. But for my money, his off-the-leash translation of video game aesthetics and experience in cinematic form happened with Dredd. Written and produced by Garland and technically directed by Pete Travis, Dredd drops the classic 2000 AD comic antihero, played by The Boys’ Karl Urban, into a The Raid-esque action scenario: To stop a violent drug lord, the Judge must blast his way through 200 stories of a highly barricaded Mega-City One high-rise. Between the slo-mo effects induced by the illicit drugand the psychic abilities of Dredd’s sidekick Cassandra, Dredd is a dizzying array of action beats that plunges viewers into a bullet hell without resorting to any gimmicky first-person shooting. By all accounts, the making of Dredd was a fraught experience for all involved, with the studio losing enough faith in Travis that Garland remained on set for the entire shoot and supervised the edit. Urban even claims Garland “actually directed the movie.” When you see it, that makes sense — even the Slo-Mo effects feel specifically like a bullet-time mechanic rather than a complete acid trip. Will Garland make a great Elden Ring movie? What does that even look like? The good news is he’s probably been thinking about it for years, as a fan of FromSoft games. In interviews over the years, the filmmaker has cited Dark Souls as a particular favorite franchise, and even offered an explanation for why an adaptation would be such a challenge. “The Dark Souls games seem to have this embedded poetry in them,” Garland told Gamespot in 2020. “You’ll be wandering around and find some weird bit of dialogue with some sort of broken song with a bit of armor outside a doorway and it feels like you’ve drifted into some existential dream. That’s what I really love about Dark Souls. These spaces are so imaginative and they seem to flow into each other and flow out of each other. It’s very dreamlikeI can’t imagine how that would. The quality that makes Dark Souls special is probably unique to video games.” The joy Garland finds in Dark Souls games isn’t far off from what Elden Ring offers him as a director — in the end, a successful adaptation will ride on mood and pace and some wicked fights. That’s what Dredd nails, even without a game as actual source material. Dredd broods without relying on too much exposition. Cassandra’s ethereal psychic powers thread a bit of innocence and whimsy into a heavy-metal dystopia. The action is brutal to the point that it often feels like a horror movie.  “Elden Ring from the guy who brought us Dredd” makes a lot of sense. Now to find an actor with eight arms… #elden #ring #movie #director #already
    WWW.POLYGON.COM
    The Elden Ring movie director already made the best video game-brained movie
    A rumored Elden Ring movie became a little more of a reality on Thursday night when Bandai Namco announced that Alex Garland (Civil War, Ex Machina) was set to direct a film adaptation of the FromSoftware action role-playing-game for indie-studio darling A24. George R.R. Martin, who provided game director Hidetaka Miyazaki with a murky amount of mythological foundation for the original game, will serve as a producer on the film. Garland might look like an odd choice for Elden Ring based on his filmography; the writer-director has never made a fantasy epic, nor has he orchestrated the kind of medieval combat that would make him an obvious choice to bring Miyazaki’s tough-as-hell boss fights to live action. But Garland’s “gamer cred” is indisputable and an understanding of play is core to much of his work. Hot take time: I’d say his 2012 film Dredd is the greatest video game movie that isn’t actually based on a video game ever made. Starting out as a novelist before pivoting to screenwriting and directing, Garland has made his gaming inspirations known throughout his career. He has said that his time outrunning zombie dogs in Resident Evil was the direct inspiration for the fast zombies in 28 Days Later, which he wrote for director Danny Boyle. When he and Boyle teamed up to adapt Garland’s own novel, The Beach, the collaboration resulted in the closest thing we will ever get to Leonardo DiCaprio’s Banjo-Kazooie movie. In 2005, riding high off 28 Days Later’s success, Garland was tasked by Microsoft with adapting Halo into a feature film — a project that stalled out and sat on a shelf for so long that streaming television was invented and Halo became a decent Paramount Plus show instead. He also went on to collaborate on actual video games: He worked with Ninja Theory and Bandai Namco on 2010’s Enslaved: Odyssey to the West, and he served as a story supervisor on 2013’s DmC: Devil May Cry. At some point around that time, he played and fell hard for The Last of Us. (In fact, Garland thinks TLOU is better than 28 Days Later, but hey, none of us are right about everything.) Garland’s gaming tastes are all over the map — in 2020 he aggressively kept up an Animal Crossing island like the rest of us — but his visible influences veer toward the AAA action experience. His adaptation of Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation has the pace and encounters of an open-world game. His FX show Devs seems right up the alley of anyone looking for Deus Ex or Control vibes. Both Civil War and his 2025 film Warfare bring audiences closer to the kind of tactical military action that we rarely see in movies, but that is all over multiplayer shooters. But for my money, his off-the-leash translation of video game aesthetics and experience in cinematic form happened with Dredd. Written and produced by Garland and technically directed by Pete Travis (Vantage Point), Dredd drops the classic 2000 AD comic antihero, played by The Boys’ Karl Urban, into a The Raid-esque action scenario: To stop a violent drug lord (Lena Heady), the Judge must blast his way through 200 stories of a highly barricaded Mega-City One high-rise. Between the slo-mo effects induced by the illicit drug (appropriately named “Slo-Mo”) and the psychic abilities of Dredd’s sidekick Cassandra, Dredd is a dizzying array of action beats that plunges viewers into a bullet hell without resorting to any gimmicky first-person shooting. By all accounts, the making of Dredd was a fraught experience for all involved, with the studio losing enough faith in Travis that Garland remained on set for the entire shoot and supervised the edit. Urban even claims Garland “actually directed the movie.” When you see it, that makes sense — even the Slo-Mo effects feel specifically like a bullet-time mechanic rather than a complete acid trip. Will Garland make a great Elden Ring movie? What does that even look like? The good news is he’s probably been thinking about it for years, as a fan of FromSoft games. In interviews over the years, the filmmaker has cited Dark Souls as a particular favorite franchise, and even offered an explanation for why an adaptation would be such a challenge. “The Dark Souls games seem to have this embedded poetry in them,” Garland told Gamespot in 2020. “You’ll be wandering around and find some weird bit of dialogue with some sort of broken song with a bit of armor outside a doorway and it feels like you’ve drifted into some existential dream. That’s what I really love about Dark Souls. These spaces are so imaginative and they seem to flow into each other and flow out of each other. It’s very dreamlike […] I can’t imagine how that would [be adapted]. The quality that makes Dark Souls special is probably unique to video games.” The joy Garland finds in Dark Souls games isn’t far off from what Elden Ring offers him as a director — in the end, a successful adaptation will ride on mood and pace and some wicked fights. That’s what Dredd nails, even without a game as actual source material. Dredd broods without relying on too much exposition. Cassandra’s ethereal psychic powers thread a bit of innocence and whimsy into a heavy-metal dystopia. The action is brutal to the point that it often feels like a horror movie (a style Garland pushed to even more gut-wrenching, realistic extremes in Warfare).  “Elden Ring from the guy who brought us Dredd” makes a lot of sense. Now to find an actor with eight arms…
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  • Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 and Warzone Season 04: Full Intel Revealed!

    Old Enemies, New Alliances:
    Black Ops 6 Season 04 is Here!
    Though he once had the chance to end Vikhor “Stitch” Kuzmin’s reign of terror, Adler spared his nemesis after they met at the culmination of Black Ops Cold War. Latest intel reveals Kuzmin was later captured and locked up in an Icelandic CIA black site until he might prove useful. Following the events and evidence uncovered by the deceased CIA Agent Jason Hudson, that day has come, and in an unlikely team up, Adler and team have broken Stitch out from his confinement, seeking his help to crack the codenames needed to find the Pantheon moles.

    With Verdansk once again an area of operations for deployment, what other plans might Stitch have in store? For now, Adler needs him to complete the mission at hand. 

    To succeed, the two must put their past behind them in pursuit of a new goal. Get in on the action when this stacked offering of free and premium content comes to Call of Duty®: Black Ops 6, launching in Season 04 on Thursday, May 29 at 9AM PT across all platforms.
    Nomenclature Note: Throughout the blog, you’ll see references to when gameplay content launches. Here are what these various suffixes mean:

    “Launch”: Expect to access this content immediately at the Season launch
    “Launch Window”: Expect to access this content between launch and up to 72 hours after launch. 
    “In Season”: Expect to access this content during the season, but before either the mid-season or next season arrives.
    “Mid-Season”: Expect to access this content at Mid-Season or later.

    All content timing may be subject to change.

    Multiplayer Content Summary

    Five MP Maps: Drop into Icelandic AOs with three new maps at launch including the Shutdown and Fugitive 6v6 Core maps and the Blitz Strike map. In the mid-season, party it up in Eclipse and play a reimagined Fringe.

    New and Returning Modes: Pick up dog tags to drain the enemy’s reserves in Team Elimination, a fun new twist on the Kill Confirmed formula. Make every bullet count with the return of One in the Chamber and get festive in the Party Ops Limited-Time Mode.

    Additional Equipment: The Grim Reaper Scorestreak returns from the original Black Ops, offering an explosive payload that’s guaranteed to blow the competition sky high.

    Season 04 Ranked Play: Challenge the best of the best, get those wins, and climb the Ranks in a new season of Multiplayer Ranked Play, with all-new rewards and bragging rights.

    ShutdownBrand-New, Core, 6v6, Small-Sized

    Before breaking out Stitch, Adler and team first need to cut off the power to the black site prison, bringing them to a hydroelectric plant built on the rugged volcanic terrain of Iceland. Fight in and around the central building housing the now wrecked Turbine or dive down the Sluice into the Lake, its waters hugging the plant’s south end by the Transformers. Jump up by the red container to target enemies from far out or swim back onshore to reach the Atrium and Parking.
    Head to the north side to fight in the rugged Yard, away from the shoreline and bookended by the Pumphouse and Canteen. It’s a quick run to the Turbine from here, giving you good map coverage down the middle. If things get too hot, you can always drop down the Chute and swim your way to safety. 

    FugitiveBrand-New, Core, 6v6, Medium-Sized

    Deploy to a secret CIA black site in a remote part of Iceland, the very location where Stitch has been imprisoned until Adler brings him in as an unlikely ally for an urgent operation. With the power out, Adler and his crew seize their chance to infiltrate the prison, climbing, zipping, and battling their way through the frozen compound.

    Upon reaching their target, Adler and Stitch strike a deal. Following the jailbreak, the alarms are blaring and warnings of a power failure light up the Cell Block.

    Though the area may appear smaller than expected when first glancing at the minimap, the prison’s intricate layout presents multiple levels and shortcuts to the various outside areas including the Checkpoint, Courtyard, and Recreation Yard. In the upper Cell Block, newly opened cells present the danger of ambush. Be on guard and look for ziplines for quick access to your next target.

    BlitzBrand-New, Strike, 6v6/2v2, Small-Sized

    Traffic comes to a halt as Pantheon reinforcements race toward the prison but get ambushed by the Rogue team. Leave the road and seek out targets over the rugged terrain of the Cliffside or move inland, ambushing enemies at the Waterfall.

    To approach the battle head on, move down the central Bridge, using the scattered convoy for cover. Jump down from the center to move underneath the Bridge, a great means of pivoting to a new location. Though a small map overall, Blitz’s long lanes leave room for marksmen to shine.

    EclipseBrand-New, Strike, 6v6/2v2, Small-Sized

    Stitch and the team arrive in Avalon, slipping into the shadows of an underground nightclub to discuss business. The neon lights flicker as they form a plan to break the Pantheon codenames, but the meeting is cut short when Pantheon agents storm in.
    Show off your best moves on the dance floor, dodging shots and flanking targets down the sides where seating offers party goers a chance to rest and order a drink from the bar. Ambush passing enemies from the DJ booth and then break through the broken façades on the walls, escaping into the halls.

    FringeRemaster, Core, 6v6, Medium-Sized

    Revisit Fringe from Call of Duty: Black Ops 3, reimagined for the first time ever in Black Ops 6. Attend the grand opening of the Rolling Hills distillery, established in an idyllic setting with several navigable buildings and the surrounding grounds. Battle along the main Road or dive into the Bar for a closer fight. Watch for sharpshooters in the upper Barn and along the Bridge and relive the thrill of trying to make it out alive through the narrow Loading route.

    The first half of Season 04 brings two exciting Multiplayer modes: Team Elimination and One in the Chamber. In the mid-season, loosen up in the Party Ops Limited Time Mode.

    Team EliminationIn this twist on Kill Confirmed, two teams are given a limited amount of lives each round as they fight to be the last surviving team. Players drop a dog tag on death that can be picked up by the enemy to confirm the kill or by a teammate to deny the opposing team. Survive longer than the other team or hold the most remaining lives when the timer ends to win the round.
    Balance aggression and defense as you seek out enemy dog tags while preserving your life. Dig in with your teammates to counter enemy attacks and then ask for cover while you collect the droppings. Picking up tags is a great way to earn your next Scorestreak, so stay aggressive and keep up the momentum. Once your team’s life pool is drained, your remaining teammates can still revive you where you were last killed in a last-ditch effort to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat.

    One in the ChamberAnother Black Ops fan-favorite mode returns as One in the Chamber shows up in Season 04! In this free-for-all mode, each Operator is given one pistol, one bullet, a knife, and three lives. Precision is king, as bullets always eliminate on impact and the only way to earn another bullet is to get an elimination.

    Stay cool, aim true, and preserve your lives while aiming for the highest score. UAV scans keep the action moving, so don’t try to hide. At the end of the match, the top three scoring Operators will step up to the Winner’s Circle.

    Party OpsGet the party started with a new Limited-Time Mode arriving later in the season: Compete in a randomized set of party themed minigames. The player with the highest score at the end of the match wins it all.
    The devastating Grim Reaper Scorestreak is back from the original Black Ops, unleashing massive hits on other Operators and Scorestreaks alike.
    New Scorestreak
    Scorestreak: Grim ReaperType: Lethal
    Score: 725
    Mastery Badges: Yes

    Powerful semi-automatic launcher that can fire up to four rockets in one load.
    Wield the Grim Reaper, a quad tube loaded Launcher capable of inflicting heavy damage on enemies. Whether targeting Operators or locking on to enemy Scorestreaks, the Grim Reaper’s payload delivers a huge explosion. The weapon is lost if you’re taken out, so save it for the right moment and bring backup to ensure you have the protection needed to unleash havoc. 
    Season 04 Ranked Play Overview

    Prove you’re the very best by dedicating your Multiplayer match time to Ranked Play, using the same settings, maps, modes, and weapon restrictions used by the Call of Duty League™. Win matches to earn SRand progress through the Ranks while earning career rewards like Rank Skins and Win Challenge rewards.
    As usual, match wins ensure you progress through the Ranks throughout Season 04 to earn new seasonal rewards like a new Pro Issue Weapon Blueprint, Rank-themed Calling Cards, Ranked Charms, and more:
    Season 04 Ranked Play Rewards

    Get 10 Wins: “Pro Reissue AMES 85” AMES 85 Weapon Blueprint
    Get 100 Wins: “Ranked Season 4 – 100 Wins” Large Decal
    Silver: “Ranked Season 4 – Silver” Calling Card
    Gold: “Ranked Season 4 – Gold” Calling Card and Charm
    Platinum: “Ranked Season 4 – Platinum” Calling Card and Charm
    Diamond: “Ranked Season 4 – Diamond” Calling Card and Charm
    Crimson: “Ranked Season 4 – Crimson” Calling Card and Charm
    Iridescent: “Ranked Season 4 – Iridescent” Calling Card and Charm
    Top 250: “Ranked Season 4 – Top 250” Calling Card and Charm
    Season 04 Champion: “Ranked Season 4 – Top 250 Champion” Calling Card

    Note: Multiplayer Events: Check the General section later in this blog to uncover the full complement of events for this mode across Season 04.

    Zombies Content Summary

    Grief Returns! Drop into this epic 4v4 competitive battle on all maps, outlasting the opposition while securing Capture Zones to debuff and Grief your opponents. The last team still standing wins!

    Additional Gameplay Content: Crack open the armored undead and create area-of-effect explosions with the Shatter Blast Ammo Mod, chew over the impressive effects of three new GobbleGums, and create even bigger explosions with the Grim Reaper Support launcher.

    New Modes and More: Unlock hidden rewards with more Dark Ops Challenges, then prepare to face down a powered-up Abomination, survive as long as you can in the Starting Room LTM, and prove your Leaderboard worth by zombie slaying for bragging rights and rewards!

    4v4 competitive mode where two teams outwit and outlast each other. Capture zones to debuff enemies. No damage against other players. Respawns every third round.
    Available Maps: Liberty Falls, Terminus, Citadelle des Morts, The Tomb, Shattered Veil.
    Restricted: Wonder Weapons, GobbleGums: Exit Strategy, Idle Eyes, Wonderbar!, Time Out, and Flavor Hex. 
    Not seen since Black Ops 2, Grief returns to Zombies! This fan-favorite mode pits two teams of four against each other, with both sides vying to out-survive the other. As the battlelines are drawn between S.A.M. and Director Richtofen, each team pledges their support to one of these rivals at the start of a match, subsequently receiving handler comms support from one of them throughout the ensuing chaos.
    Indirect PvP Combat
    The action is almost immediate as both teams drop into either side of the same Grief Arena within the chosen Zombies map, and indirect PvP combat comes into effect: The two teams of four players can’t outright kill members of the enemy team, but can interact with them by body-blocking, or slowing them  by using melee, bullet-based weapons, or projectiles. 
    Victory Conditions: The winning team is the one that manages to “Grief” their rivals into being killed or entering a downed state. As long as one or more team members are upright, the match continues!
    Grief Arena Features

    The action is constant and can get incredibly chaotic, due in part to your proximity to your opponents and the hordes of undead encroaching on your team, thanks to the Arena being a sub-section of the main Zombies map. These are known as “Grief Arenas.” Within a Grief Arena are a variety of features:
    An Open Environment: Grief Arenas are clearly defined areas where any critical doors have already been opened, and the power will already have been turned on. All other Door Buys are inactive. Both teams spawn on opposite sides of the Arena, each in a group of four.
    Player Respawning: Any team members that are downed – provided one or more of their team are still alive – can be revived at any time, though rival teams, undead enemies, and Shock Charges can hamper this action! Additionally, a Wave Respawner triggers every third round, automatically reviving any eliminated teammates from both teams.
    Join In Progress: Any player not in the game can join up until Round 10 has been completed and has a small grace period to orient themselves before they’re swarmed by zombies. Additionally, if a team has won back-to-back Capture Zones, join-in-progress is not available.
    Essence and Salvage: Unlike in Standard playlists, Salvage pickups in Grief are worth 100 Salvage, visible to all players, and can only be picked up by the first player to grab it.
    Zombies: Rounds will progress faster than usual and the amount of zombies per round has been increased to account for 8 players! All undead entities – except for bosses – are to be expected. If players fail to kill zombies, the round will turn.
    Core Mechanics: The Arsenal, Pack-a-Punch, Mystery Box, Crafting Tables, Perk machines, GobbleGum machine, Armor Wall Buys, and Der Wunderfizz machine are available in a Grief Arena where they normally reside, or in a new location if they don’t normally exist in this portion of their respective maps. Note: While the current GobbleGum restrictions are in place to keep matches dynamic yet balanced, additional restrictions may be made in the future as the developers keep an eye on game balance, similar to Ranked Play.
    Capture Zones: Appearing at a regular cadence during a match, these are smaller areas within a Grief Arena where players are required to stand and earn specific types of kills to trigger a Grief  on the opposing team.
    Plan A: Survive! Plan B: Capture Zones!

    Keeping your team upright and focused on undead slaying for longer than your rivals is the main plan in this mode. However, there’s an important secondary focus you need to plan for: Capturing zones and “Griefing” your rival team!
    Capture Zones appear at regular intervals throughout a match, and after stepping through the glowing perimeter, you and your team can secure the Zone by staying inside it and dispatching zombies. Beckon your crew into a Zone to quicken the zombie slaying, and once your kill count meets the requirement, a Grief is triggered on the opposition. Note that if neither team reaches this requirement within the countdown inside a Capture Zone, the Grief is applied to both teams.

    What is a Grief? It’s a temporary debuff, penalty, or negative gameplay mechanic that you can inflict on your rival team at a Capture Zone.
    The type of Grief is shown at the objective tracker within a Capture Zone. Here are the possible Griefs you’re aiming to inflict on your foes:

    Weapon Nerf: The affected players inflict considerably reduced damage to zombie enemies.
    Ammo Drain: All ammo-based weapons, including those stowed, receive an ammo drain with bullets or shells being removed constantly while the Grief is active.
    Zombie Ambush: An Elite zombie is summoned, and it solely focuses its killing power on the enemy team until either the Elite or the team are defeated, or the timer runs out.
    Weapon Carousel: The rival players’ weapons are randomly swapped every few seconds.
    Frozen: This Grief reduces the enemy players’ movement, along with frost and ice coating the characters.

    Griefs and Capture Zones also introduce new score types, including:

    Capture Zone Kill: Awarded to a player who defeated a zombie type during a successful Capture Zone completion.
    Capture Zone Win: Awarded to all players on a team who successfully commandeer a Capture Zone.
    Capture Zone Elite Kill: Awarded to a player who slays an Elite spawned in a Capture Zone.

    Available Grief ArenasA total of 11 different Grief Arenas are available in this mode. Here’s a list along with a brief description of the points of interest within each one:

    Liberty Falls Arena 1: Pump & Pay, Motor Lodge, and Fuller’s Liberty Lanes
    Liberty Falls Arena 2: Dark Aether Church, Cemetery, Hilltop
    Terminus Arena 1: Bio Lab
    Terminus Arena 2: Crab Island 
    Citadelle des Morts Arena: Courtyard, Ramparts, and Entrance Hall
    The Tomb Arena 1: Dig Site, Mausoleum
    The Tomb Arena 2: Dark Aether Nexus
    Shattered Veil Arena 1: Garden Pond, Lower Terrace
    Shattered Veil Arena 2: Upper Terrace, Shem’s Henge, Motor Court
    Shattered Veil Arena 3: Mansion Foyer, Overlook, East Foyer, Library
    Shattered Veil Arena 4: West Hallways, Southwest Balcony, Bottlery

    Access the following new content within all five Zombies Mapsthroughout Season 04:
    Dark Ops ChallengesA mysterious new set of hidden Calling Cards and bounteous amounts of XP are available at the start of Season 04, thanks to a fresh drop of Zombies Dark Ops Challenges. Who knows... maybe there’s even one for Grief. All further information is].
    New LTM: Starting RoomInspired by the starting room in the classic “Moon” Zombies map, drop in with up to three of your Zombies crew into a more straightforward but challenging experience where you’re locked into the first zone of a map. Raptor One is gone, and those undead hordes are only getting stronger, but all doors in the initial zone are locked. Survive to the highest round you can!
    New LTM: Abomination ChallengeEnter a warped version of Liberty Falls during this new Mid-Season Event, and hunt down an ultra-powered-up Abomination. Perhaps it’s wise to bring backup.

    Wreck even the most battle-hardened undead threat with the explosive power of the Shatter Blast Ammo Mod, then drop even more devastating firepower on the hordes with the Grim Reaper Support launcher. There’s three new chewables, too!
    Ammo Mod: Shatter BlastAvailable: Augments Menu, and In-Game“Bullets deal explosive damage. Each bullet has a chance to create an explosion that destroys armor.”
    Modify your ammunition to explode the toughened armor of certain normal and Special undead enemies. This mod also has a second benefit, creating an area-of-effect blast radius at the same time, whether any armor is shattered or not. 
    Due to the somewhat chaotic nature of this modification, there is a random chance of the Shatter Blast effect triggering, and it won’t happen every time you fire. Also expect a cooldown period after the effect. Note that Shatter Blast doesn’t directly affect Elite enemies, but area-of-effect explosions can still damage them.
    You are wise to wrangle your undead into hordes so they’re near each other, to really inflict some damage!
    Shatter Blast: Major Augments

    Research the following Augments to further customize this Ammo Mod.
    Big Game
    Shatter Blast can be used against Elite enemies. Expect an impressively sized explosion.

    Blast Chain
    On explosion, three additional explosions occur in rapid succession.

    Blast Repair
    For every enemy that has its armor destroyed by Shatter Blast, armor health will be restored for the player.
    Shatter Blast: Minor Augments
    Blast Zone
    Increase the size of the explosion.
    Blast Boost
    Increase the explosion damage.
    Blast Wave
    Normal enemies are knocked down by the explosion.
    New GobbleGumsCrack your teeth on three new GobbleGums, available across all maps once you earn or unlock them and equip them in your GobbleGum Loadout Pack.
    Explosive Flourish: Reloading your weapon creates an explosion around you. GobbleGum lasts 2 minutes.
    Flavor Hex: Activates a random Ultra GobbleGum.
    Rainburps: Zombies killed belch sparkly rainbow bubbles. Lasts 3 minutes.
    Additional Support Weapon: Grim ReaperAvailable: Rivals Event reward

    Salvage: 2000
    Hammer away at the Crafting Table and assemble a powerful semi-automatic launcher known as the Grim Reaper, which deals out lethal damage to the undead with up to a quartet of missiles fired in one load. With a capacity to carry up to a dozen rockets, and the ability to fire them individually or as a quartet of devastation, this can level a courtyard of undead with a single launch! Unlock this Support weapon once you’ve earned it via the Rivals Event.
    Note: Zombies Events: Check the General section later in this blog to uncover a first look at events for this mode across Season 04, including the King of the Dead Leaderboard challenge!

    Call of Duty: Warzone Content Summary

    New Point of Interest: The towering skyscraper known as The Overlook comes to Downtown Verdansk, with ziplines, cranes, and an impressive interior to explore.

    New and Limited Time Modes: Clash mode – the massive 52v52 Verdansk Deathmatch – is back! Join 51 other Operators in a chaotic firefight to claim domination points and defeat foes. Then compete in a specially themed area of Verdansk in a match with rule-bending modifiers in Havoc Royale. And drop into Rebirth Island for a spot of Resurgence Casual human and bot combat.

    Doubling Down on Ranked Play: Call of Duty: Warzone doubles down – literally – with two separate Ranked Play modes; Battle Royale: Rankedat launch running throughout the entire season, and the return of Ranked Play to Rebirth Island at Mid-season.

    New Features: Cranes and horizontal ziplines Downtown. Lobby Lockdown in The Overlook.

    Look up and look out! 

    Dominate foes with a gigantic new skyscraper point of interest, available to Operators within the vicinity of Downtown! The old tenement blocks, Burger Town, and SKN Comm tower have been demolished, and construction crews are finalizing a sprawling skyscraper that dominates the landscape! Look for a full recon tour below.
    Recon Tour: The Overlook

    As construction nears completion on this behemoth of a skyscraper, it’s worth gaining a tactical advantage on this monolithic new point of interest.
    The Overlook Footprint: The “Diamond” and Perimeter Security Checkpoints

    Drop into the grounds of The Overlook, and you’ll immediately see the grounds of the new skyscraper under construction stretch in a rough diamond shape around the location of the old SKN Comm Tower. Flanked by two massive cranes, the building plot perimeter runs from the corner of the main bank, clockwise past the Post Office, passing the Rothwynn Donna building, northeast to the Museum/Art Gallery, and follows the road around to City Hall. 

    All the older structureshave been bulldozed in the name of progress!
    Perimeter Security Checkpoints

    Military-style security checkpoints have been set up on the corners and roads of the plot of land within the footprint of the structure. Most aren’t secure enough to impede vehicular progress, and some have ramps to allow airborne access. These serve as helpful visual cues that you’re entering the new POI, The Overlook. 
    Ground Level: Construction Sites

    Most of the groundwork around the skyscraper is in its final stages of completion, but there are plenty of barriers, fencing, canopies, and containers to use as cover in the area below each of the two giant cranes north and south of the structure.
    Ground Level: Restaurants

    Burger Town: Fans of the famous Burger Town Double Cheeseburger will be thrilled to know the fast-food chain has relocated a few meters further down the road from its previous location and is contained within the massive footprint of The Overlook. This outlet also serves as a lower entrance into the grand foyer interior of the building.
    Sushi Bar: Diagonally opposite the Burger Town, on the northwest side of the POI, is a small Sushi bar, within the footprint of the tower itself. Nestled in the stepped courtyard, you can quickly advance to the north crane or main lobby entrance. It’s also worth pointing out that the sight lines around this POI have significantly changed since Season 03, with much greater visibility across familiar POIs within Downtown and the surrounding districts.
    North and South Cranes

    Two huge cranes flank the north and south side of the monolith and are another way to traverse into The Overlook at great height. With five separate platforms attached to the mast to land on, use the vertical Ascender built into the crane’s mast and take an eight-second ascent to a platform just below the jib that extends out to the main winch, and the hoist allowing a jump to The Overlook roof. Operators who aren’t challenged by vertigo will have wild and panoramic views that extend to all of Verdansk’s POIs!

    Both cranes are also functional, and providing you’ve found the necessary controls in the vicinity, cargo on the hook block and hoist can be summoned and moved to various locations around the tower and nearby Downtown buildings, in case you or your team needs a daring lift!
    Zip Lines and Additional Rooftop Cover

    Increasing the ways you can quickly traverse and gaingreat height in your tactical positioning near The Overlook exterior, zip-lines provide a diagonal route to and from the surrounding Downtown building rooftops. 

    Each also has a small billboard or other protective cover as you reach the zipline mechanism. Access to and from Overlook at the following locations:

    South: Post Office rooftop to Skydeck.
    West: Rothwynn Donna building rooftop to Skydeck.
    Northeast: Art Gallery/Museum rooftop to Skydeck.
    East: City Hall dome rooftop to Skydeck. 

    The Overlook: Entrance and Lobby Lockdown

    The Overlook has a substantial exterior and interior presence, mainly tiered fountains, planting, and stairs up to forecourts and shuttered entrances to the north, east, south, and west, all leading to a central interior lobby. If you find the main entrances shuttered, it means the lobby is experiencing a lockdown. Perhaps there’s a way to breach this security? Are there other ways to get in?

    The interior lobby has a coffee shop, mezzanine office, stairs, a variety of cover options, and other areas to investigate, not least the marginally terrifying 18-storey elevator ascenders to the northeast and southwest, and even those only get you halfway up the inside of the tower.
    The Overlook: Atrium and SkydeckJust above the midway point within The Overlook tower is a five-floor interior with exterior Skydeck. Depending on your use of ziplines, you’re able to access a large Atrium with concrete tile and planters and an abundance of plant life. Around the perimeter are rooms, stairwells, and two new elevator shafts, all enabling you to reach the exterior Skydeck.

    Known by some locals as the “cyclops” tower, due to this large central upper opening you can fly a helicopter through, the Skydeck features a small glass pyramid, some windswept seating, and infiltration to the floors above. 

    The large, rectangular holes on all four sides provide zipline access around Downtown, as well as daring helicopter maneuvers through the gaps. The ascent doesn’t end here; enter any of the four pillars holding up the roof of the skyscraper for another elevator ascender ride.
    The Overlook: Penthouse, RoofThe remaining upper floors of The Overlook are nearing completion, meaning health and safety rules aren’t being observed as stringently as you’d like. Top floors up from the Skydeck is the roof. Missing windows, exterior gantries without railings, and exposed exterior ladders mean you’ll be thankful for your parachute. 

    Depending on which of the tower corners you’re fighting through, this offers another five floors to investigate, including rooms that are fully furnished. 

    These include a security and server room, a two-floor penthouse level with opulent bedroom, kitchen, and games area, and that’s before the more perturbed of Operators learn the secrets of the] room! 

    As well as the usual Battle Royale and Resurgence playlists across Verdansk and Rebirth Island, major modes – Clash and Battle Royale: Ranked Play – return to the game, with the intriguing Havoc Royale and the arrival of Resurgence: Ranked Play on Rebirth Island at mid-season!

    Clash LTM104 players, 15-minute matches

    52v52 Team Deathmatch chaos is back in Call of Duty: Warzone!
    First introduced into Call of Duty: Warzone during Season Five of Black Ops Cold War back in September 2021 as a revamped version of the original “Rumble” mode, Clash is back, bigger than ever, and now includes some impressive, game-changing equipment and power-ups only available in this mode. But what is Clash Mode?
    This is Team Deathmatch and Domination on a massive scale!
    Overview, Win Conditions, and Scoring
    This action-packed team-based mode takes place in and around a specific POI within Verdansk, and pits two teams of 52 playersagainst each other. With no Circle Collapse, no last stand benefit for the Survivor Perk, and your Loadouts available immediately, the plan is simple; your side needs to acquire 500 points by the end of the 15-minute time limit. These are mainly gained by slaying enemies, completing contracts, and participating in the in-game Public Events, as well as the following:
    Scoring:

    1 point per enemy elimination
    2 points per enemy elimination with Double Down Power Up
    5 points per Contract completed
    10 points for capturing a Domination Point10 points for capturing a Bonus Crate or a Cash Crate

    Clash: Available Locations
    Expect Clash matches to occur across a sub-section of the main Verdansk map, incorporating several adjacent areas around the following POIs:

    Quarry
    Boneyard
    Farmland
    PromenadeClash: Available Vehicles
    With the impetus to reach the enemy forces never more important, expect heavy use of vehicles throughout a Clash Match. The full complement of currently available ground and air vehicles are as follows:

    Heli
    Cargo Truck
    LTVPolaris RZR Pro R 4

    Available Contracts
    There are three available Contracts to complete in Clash Mode:

    Scavenger
    Search and Destroy
    Recon

    The Scavenger and Recon Contracts work in the same way as they do in Battle Royale Matches. In addition to the usual rewards and in-game cash, you receive five team points for each Contract completed.
    Search and Destroy Contracts: Everything must go with this new contract, where one team plants a bomb on a Buy Station, and on detonation, they can earn impressive rarity weapons and items from the Buy Stations’ inventory. The other teams can defuse the bomb to earn a Fire Sale for a major discount from the Buy Stations. 
    Expect the Search and Destroy Contract to be available in Battle Royale, Resurgence, and Plunder Modes, at Mid-Season.
    In-Match Events and Domination Points

    During a Clash match, expect several in-match Events to occur. These are like those in Battle Royale Matches, though Clash Events are timed throughout the match rather than related to the Circle Collapse. The available Events are:

    Domination Points
    Bonus Points Crates
    Clash Firesale
    Cash Crates
    Power Surge

    Domination Points Event: Up to three single capture Dom Pointsappear on the map, and these respawn throughout the match. Much like the Multiplayer Mode of the same name, a team that reaches and captures one of the Dom Points receives a reward; in this case, 10 team points.
    Bonus Points Crates Event: A cargo plane flies across the center of the map, and up to four crates are dropped. Teams are likely to head to the crates as they float to the ground, as capturing a crate awards you with 10 team points.
    Clash Firesale Event: For the next two minutes, all players can take advantage of a Firesale as two Portable Buy Stations are dropped into the backfield of each team. Additionally, all loot crates are restocked and cash found in crates is also increased. 
    Cash Crates: Capture oneof the three Cash Crates that drop during this event also nets you 10 team points.
    Power Surge Event: For the next two minutes, there’s an increased drop rate of Power Ups when you dispatch an enemy player or loot any ground caches.
    Clash Mode Gameplay Features

    As well as the previously mentioned new Search and Destroy Contract, Clash comes loaded with features unique to the mode. Here’s the full run-down of what to expect:
    Buy Stations: Expect Buy Stations to be scattered across a Clash map and roughly split between each team’s area of operations. Portable Buy Stations are also available during the Firesale In-Match Event. Here’s what you can purchase:

    Armor Plate: Munitions Box: Trophy System: Counter UAV: Sentry Turret: Hand Cannon: Bunker Buster: Cluster Strike: Precision Airstrike: Specialist Perk: New Field Upgrade: Door Barricade: Control access points more easily during mid or close-quarter combat scenarios and delay enemy incursions with the Door Barricade.
    Fit a barricade to a close single or double door, and a heavy-duty lock attaches toboth sides, preventing the opening or access through the door. This is until the barricade is either removed, or destroyed, usually by using explosives, though gunfire and melee equipment is also an option.
    Expect the Door Barricade to be loot in Battle Royale and Battle Royale Casual Modes, via the new Care Package Killstreak, all coming at Mid-Season.
    New Killstreak: Hand Cannon: This high-powered pistol Killstreak, originally available in Multiplayer during Season 01, is available in ground cache as rare loot. Expect a slow rate of fire and finite ammunition, but good handling, and improved hip fire accuracy with faster hip-fire shooting speed.
    Expect the Hand Cannon to be rare loot in Battle Royale, Battle Royale Casual, Resurgence, and Plunder Modes, via the new Care Package Killstreak, all coming at Mid-Season.
    Feature: SAM Turrets: Chopper and drone pilots take note; Clash mode maps feature SAM Turrets in various tactical positions across the environment. Spend of in-match cash to activate these anti-air missile batteries and use them up to four times to target any aircraft and drones in the area. If you’re flying in the Heli on the receiving end of a SAM barrage, now’s the time to utilize flares to counter the incoming missiles!
    Train: If a Clash map features a portion of the large, circular railroad track that the train travels along, then this hulking engine and loot-filled carriages are parked and available to use as added cover and looting opportunities.
    UAV Towers: Providing you have the in-match cash to activate them, teams can head to and capture a few scattered UAV Towers, allowing pinging of enemy movement across the local area.
    Clash Mode Powerups 
    Clash Mode features five differently hued in-match Powerups that are automatically used when found. Available as a possible loot drop or sometimes appearing as dropped loot near the body of an eliminated enemy Operator, these Powerups are color-coded and offer temporary benefits to the Operator who grabs them. All five can be obtained in a single match and expect the frequency of available Powerups to be significantly increased if the in-match Power Surge Event activates. Here’s what each of the five Clash Powerups grant you:

    Hunter: Highlights enemies and allies in red and blue respectively. Allies are visible through walls. Applies Tracker and High Alert Perks.
    Speed Boost: Prevents fall damage and provides approximately 20 percent speed boost to your movement.
    Regeneration Aura: Refills your health and armor at roughly 20 percent per second. Allies within a small radius around you also receive this benefit. The effect does not stack.
    Double Down: Grants you two points per enemy Operator elimination instead of one.
    Kill Mag: Refills your active weapon magazine after a kill and quickens your reload.

    Havoc Royale LTM44 players, 15-minute matches

    Compete in a Call of Duty: Warzone match like no other, where rule bending modifiers twist the realities of the usual Resurgence gameplay in chaotic and game-changing ways. 
    Drop into a specially themed area of Verdansk with your Loadout. Every new gas circle activates a different modifier. Adapt fast to sudden changes as Havoc modifiers may impact you, the environment, and even the gameplay rules. Survive the Havoc, be the last team standing, and claim victory!
    Expect a full rundown of this game mode in the Season 04 Reloaded blog, just prior to Mid-season.

    Resurgence Casual44 Players, Players & Bots

    Infil into Rebirth Island with your squad and commit to winning using the regular Resurgence ruleset, but with one important twist; some of your adversaries aren’t human! Whether facing down a bot or not, Resurgence Casual is a great mode to drop into whether you’re warming up, teaching a new player about the game, or you’re wanting a Resurgence match that isn’t quite as extreme as normal.
    As with Battle Royale Casual or Call of Duty: Warzone Bootcamp, game progression is limited in this mode and results will not count towards or against your stats. This mode also doesn’t count towards your eligibility to accessing Resurgence Ranked Play when it arrives at Mid-Season.

    Grind your way towards a coveted position in the Top 250 as Battle Royale: Ranked Play becomes the first of two Ranked Play variants to drop in Season 04 within Call of Duty: Warzone. Harness the competitive spirit and earn new rewards for ranking up and advancing through the Skill Divisions, unlocking the following rewards as you go:
    Season 04 BR Ranked Play Rewards

    First Season Win: Weapon Charm
    Get 25 Eliminations: Elimination Sticker
    Get 100 Eliminations: Elimination Weapon Camo
    Get 250 Eliminations: Elimination LR 7.62 Weapon Blueprint
    Silver: “Ranked Season 4 – Silver” Emblem
    Gold: “Ranked Season 4 – Gold” Emblem and Decal
    Platinum: “Ranked Season 4 – Platinum” Emblem and Decal
    Diamond: “Ranked Season 4 – Diamond” Emblem and Decal
    Crimson: “Ranked Season 4 – Crimson” Emblem and Decal
    Iridescent: “Ranked Season 4 – Iridescent” Emblem and Decal
    Top 250: “Ranked Season 4 – Top 250” Emblem and Decal
    Season 04 Champion: “Ranked Season 4 – Top 250 Champion” Emblem

    Ranked Play: ResurgenceTrios, Rebirth Island

    Craving some real competition on Rebirth Island? Then squad up with your winning Trio, and attempt dominance over the very best players as Resurgence Ranked Play makes its triumphant return! Expect the same rules set you remember during the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare® III era, and an expanded look at this returning, fan-favorite mode in the Season 04 Reloaded blog, just prior to Mid-season.
    Ranked Play Notes: Battle Royale: Ranked Playruns from Launch Window throughout the entirety of Season 04. Resurgence: Ranked Playbegins at Mid-Season, and runs alongside Battle Royale: Ranked Play, meaning you can play one or both Modes when they are active. The ranking is separate from Battle Royale: Ranked Play.
    A new Contract, Field Upgrade, Killstreak, Perk, and ATV are all set to drop into Verdansk during Season 04:
    Clash Mode Features ExpansionAfter an evaluation period in Call of Duty: Warzone’s Clash Mode, expect the following new equipment to become available across additional modes at mid-season. Here’s what to expect:

    Contract: Search & Destroy: Battle Royale, Resurgence, Plunder.
    Field Upgrade: Door Barricade: Battle Royale, Battle Royale Casual Modes. Available via Care Package.
    Killstreak: Hand Cannon: Battle Royale, Battle Royale Casual, and Plunder Modes. Available via Care Package.

    Killstreak: Care PackageOpen ground loot caches for a rare chance to obtain the Care Package, a throwable Killstreak that, when lobbed, explodes into trail of smoke, after which a loadout-sized crate falls from the skies. Open this crate for a chance to obtain rare loot including rare equipment, the Specialist Perk, and more.
    New Perk: Loot MasterAvailable only as Ground Loot during Resurgence and Plunder matches, the Loot Master Perk allows you to maximize your scavenging potential and gear up faster by increasing the amount of loot you find while opening caches. Gain the early advantage or sustain yourself during prolonged engagements. Expect an increased drop rate for equipped weapon ammo, a higher chance to find tacticals and lethals, more cash, and a greater chance at field upgrades, killstreaks, and other high-tier gear.
    ATV: Polaris Sportsman XP 1000Added to the vehicle pool is the Polaris Sportsman XP 1000, a real wild ride allowing you to hit the Verdansk goat trails in comfort with legendary suspension, great clearance and traction, and versatility for positioning up to three Operators on the surface of the vehicle. Compared to the current ATV, the wheelbase and size of the Sportsman XP 1000 offers more stability than ever before. 
    Note: Call of Duty: Warzone Events: Check the General section later in this blog to uncover the full complement of events for this mode across Season 04.

    General ContentCall of Duty: General Content SummaryWeapons Detail: Five new weapons arrive in Season 04, including two at launch: the LC10 SMG and FFAR 1 Assault Rifle. Later in the season, get your hands on the , Essex Model 07 Marksman Rifle, Olympia Special weapon and Pickaxe Melee weapon, and change up your playstyle with new attachments.

    The Events Horizon: Season 04 is packed with Events, including Rivals, Ballerina, and even more coming mid-season.. Plus, prove your worth across the Zombies leaderboards and become King of the Dead!

    Battle Pass and BlackCell: The Season 04 Battle Pass brings Stitch and brutal BlackCell Operator Omen to the forefront alongside new Weapon Blueprints, Operator Skins, Calling Cards, Finishing Moves, Emotes, and more in a mix of free and premium tiers. Free tiers include two new base weapons and the G-Grip Tactical Foregrip.

    Season 04 Operators: Stitch returns after being freed from prison, headlining the new Battle Pass next to the sinister Omen leading BlackCell. Plus, deploy as assassin Eve Macarro in a collaboration with Ballerina, followed by much more at the mid-season.

    CDL Announcements: Major IV is almost here! Find out where to watch, plus the in-game rewards you can unlock, just for tuning in!

    Primary Weapon: LC10SMG, Battle Pass Page 3, Page 14 Battle Pass Blueprint

    Levels: 38
    MAGS: 4
    MAG SIZE: 34
    Mastery Badges: Yes
    Attachments: Optic, Muzzle, Barrel, Underbarrel, Magazine, Rear Grip, Stock, Laser, Fire Mods
    Customize Options: Skins, Camos and Reticle Unlocks, Accessories, Decals, Stickers.
    Full-auto submachine gun. Excellent accuracy and range, with a moderate rate of fire. Average mobility and very slow handling for its class.
    Returning after its debut in Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War, the LC10 SMG spits out rounds fast coupled with good accuracy and range, moderate damage, and a quick reload to get you back into the fight.
    The weapon performs well off the hip or down sights, with 34 rounds in the base magazine for a hefty ammo supply. Via Gunsmith, equip a variety of improvements such as a Laser for improved hipfire spread and an updated Barrel to further extend the weapon’s respectable damage range.

    Primary Weapon: FFAR 1Assault Rifle, Battle Pass Page 6, Page 11 HVT Tier Battle Pass Blueprint

    Levels: 42
    MAGS: 3
    MAG SIZE: 30
    Mastery Badges: Yes
    Attachments: Optic, Muzzle, Barrel, Underbarrel, Magazine, Rear Grip, Stock, Laser, Fire Mods
    Customize Options: Skins, Camo and Reticle Unlocks, Accessories, Decals, Stickers.
     Full-auto assault rifle. Very high rate of fire and excellent CQB power, but slower handling and mobility.
    Boasting a blazing fast fire rate that rivals the SMG weapon class, this bullpup Assault Rifle is designed for taking down targets fast. The somewhat unpredictable recoil favors burst fire when tackling distant targets, but once you’re locked on it’s all over for them. Supporting a variety of Underbarrel Launcher attachments, use Gunsmith to add greater versatility to the weapon. Running low on ammo? Grab an Extended Mag while you’re at it.
    Primary Weapon: Essex Model 07Marksman Rifle, Event Reward

    Levels: 38
    MAGS: 3
    MAG SIZE: 8
    Mastery Badges: Yes
    Attachments: Optic, Muzzle, Barrel, Underbarrel, Magazine, Lever, Stock, Laser, Fire Mods
    Customize Options: Skins, Camo and Reticle Unlocks, Accessories, Decals, Stickers.
    Lever-action marksman rifle. High damage potential. Balanced by slower rate of fire and handling.
    Inflict heavy critical point damage with this lever-action tactical rifle. An ideal tool for the new sheriff in town, this classic armament offers smooth handling with shots that quickly recenter after kicking up. Choose from a variety of Levers to further customize the weapon’s action, improving ADS speed, sprint to fire speed, and other movement abilities. 
    Special Weapon: OlympiaSpecial, Event Reward

    Levels: 30
    MAGS: 8
    MAG SIZE: 2
    Mastery Badges: Yes
    Attachments: Barrel, Stock
    Customize Options: Skins, Camos, Accessories, Decals, Stickers.
    Double-barrel shotgun. Very high damage and respectable range but requires frequent reloading.
    The double-barrel Olympia – not seen since Black Ops 3 – makes its debut in Black Ops 6, returning as a Special Weapon that makes for the perfect backup when entering tight spaces. The Olympia holds two shots at a time, each spraying multiple pellets when your Operator pulls the trigger. Light customization via the Short Barrel and Cut-Off Stock attachments gives you some control over the weapon’s playstyle, but the fundamentals remain the same: get up close and make your shots count. Fire down the sight for a tighter pellet spread or shoot off the hip to inflict damage over a wider area.
    Melee Weapon: PickaxeMelee, Event Reward

    Levels: 30
    Mastery Badges: Yes
    Attachments: None
    Customize Options: Skins.
    One-hit kill. Medium attack speed. Short range.
    Without a Pickaxe, you’ll be lost in the tundra. Bring the right tool for the job when deploying to Iceland in Season 04’s Multiplayer maps, starting with this deadly Melee weapon that downs unarmored enemies with brutal severity. Though its range is short, the Pickaxe’s combination of rapid slashes and overhead swipes will keep enemies frozen in their tracks. Close the distance and say farewell.

    G-GripSMGs, Assault Rifles, Battle Pass Page 7 Reward
    Vertical foregrip with integrated laser for improved firing stability, horizontal recoil control, and tightened spread when transitioning between hipfire and aiming down sights. Beam: Blue. Blocks Laser attachments.
    Stryder .22 3-Round Burst ModStryder .22 Pistol, Event Reward
    Convert the Stryder .22 into a 3-round burst. Drastically improves fire rate and maintains manageable gun kick but alters the weapon’s damage profile outside of the effective range.

    SVD Full Auto ModSVD Sniper Rifle, Event Reward
    Convert the SVD from semi-auto to full-auto functionality, ramping up the speed of your damage output and drastically improving recoil and handling.
    TR2 CQB Auto ConversionTR2 Marksman Rifle, Event Reward
    Alter the TR2 Marksman Rifle to fire handgun caliber rounds, resulting in a Marksman Rifle with a compact frame and fully automatic capabilities that rival fire rates of an SMG!
    Stitch Returns to Action in the Season 04 Battle Pass

    Stitch returns to the fray, leading this season’s Battle Pass content in a shocking team up with Adler. Purchase the Season 04 Battle Pass for 1,100 COD Points or the Season 04 Battle Pass Bundle for 2,400 COD Points to immediately unlock the Instant Rewards Page of the Battle Pass, including the following items:

    10% Battle Pass XP Boost
    The new “Supermax” Stitch Operator and “Supermax BlackCell” Stitch Operator Skin for those who purchase BlackCell
    The “Lock Up” Legendary Blueprint for the Feng 82 LMG
    The “Try Me!” Emote
    The “Untamable” Large Decal
    Start to unlock up to 1,100 COD Points as you progress through the Battle Pass

    The Season 04 Battle Pass includes over 110 pieces of unlockable contentincluding two new Base Weapons, the G-Grip Tactical Foregrip Attachment, and several unlockable mil-sim style skins for Bailey, Payne, Grey, Caine, Brutus, Toro, Adler, Nazir, and Marshall. Stay tuned for the BlackCell, Battle Pass and Store Bundles blog prior to Season 04 launch for more details.
    BlackCell Offerings

    When the job needs to get done, summon Omen, the otherworldly Operator leading BlackCell content in Season 04. The menacing Operator and his three-headed guard dog are joined by a cast of infected, black and purple-hued Operator Skins and Weapon Blueprints earned exclusively through BlackCell.
    BlackCell owners can access the Season 04 Battle Pass via the exclusive BlackCell Page, instantly unlocking the following items:

    The “Omen” BlackCell Operator and Skin
    10% XP Boost
    1,100 COD Points
    The “Guard Dog” Companion Finishing Move
    The “Hellblock” Mastercraft Blueprint for the Ladra SMG
    The “Kill Tally” Gun Screen
    The “BlackCell” Clan TagBlackCell owners get access to page after page of additional exclusive rewards within the Season 04 Battle Pass, including:

    Seven BlackCell-exclusive skins for Stitch, Bailey, Payne, Caine, Brutus, and Adler. 
    Seven BlackCell-exclusive Weapon Blueprints for the Krig C, XMG, SWAT 5.56, ASG-98, FFAR 1, Model L, LC10Over 130 item rewardsfor those who fully complete the Season 04 BlackCell Battle Pass.

    As usual, players who upgrade to BlackCell after purchasing the Battle Pass will also receive back the COD Points they spent.
    BlackCell Daily Challenges: Players with BlackCell will receive additional Daily Challenges throughout Season 04 for Multiplayer, Zombies, and Call of Duty: Warzone, giving even more chances to rake in the XP during your play sessions!
    BlackCell Loyalty Bonus: Players who purchased BlackCell in a previous Black Ops 6season and go on to purchase Season 04 BlackCell will earn a permanent 10% Player and Weapon XP Loyalty Bonus, up to 30% for players who purchased Season 01, Season 02, and Season 03 BlackCell!
    The return of Stitch signals a shift in the battles ahead, requiring new Operators to meet the demands of the intensifying conflict. Predict a swift demise for your opponents with Omen leading BlackCell, joined by Stitch at the head of the Battle Pass plus a special appearance by Eve Macarro from Ballerina.
    Omen“Omen” Operator: BlackCell Instant Reward Page

    It’s time for lockdown. Omen is a presence who strikes fear even in the world’s most dangerous criminals, with an almost preternatural ability to keep even the most sinister prisoners in line.
    Stitch“Supermax” and “Yard Dog” Skins: Battle Pass Instant Reward Page, Battle Pass Completion Page

    Until recently, Stitch was assumed dead. Instead of eliminating his enemy, however, Adler sent him off to a black site prison. Now the time has come, and following a daring jailbreak, Stitch is once again free. Adler needs his help cracking the codenames that will finally lead to the Pantheon moles, but at what cost?
    BallerinaStore Bundle

    Seeking revenge for her slain father, Eve Macarro embarks on a relentless mission against the High Table’s most feared opponents in Ballerina, the highly anticipated new action film from the World of John Wick. Deploy as the elite assassin in one of two looks in the Ballerina Bundle arriving in Season 04.

    Participate in a new round of scheduled Events across Multiplayer, Zombies, and Call of Duty: Warzone. Earn rewards like new weapons, special attachments, and more. Here’s a first look at the Events to come:
    Event: BallerinaActivation Dates: June 5 to June 12
    Total Rewards: 10Enter the world of John Wick with the new Ballerina Event. Prove your capabilities as a supreme assassin by slaying your way across Multiplayer, Zombies, and Call of Duty: Warzone. Rewards include the new Essex Model 07 Marksman Rifle and a Ballerina-themed Nunchuck Melee Blueprint for BlackCell Owners.
    Event: RivalsActivation Dates: June 12 to June 26
    Total Rewards: 15Enemies become allies in the Rivals Event, when Stitch brings his code-cracking expertise to help uncover the real names of the final Pantheon moles in the CIA. The goal is simple; prove you’re the most proficient Operator by earning XP across all game modes and unlock a plethora of impressive free items. Dominate your enemies to become the first to unlock rewards including the Stryder .22 3-Round Burst Modand Grim Reaper.

    Events: King of the Dead, Master of GriefActivation Dates: June 26 to July 3
    Activation Dates: July 10 to July 17
    King of the Dead: “Eliminate zombies in any Zombie mode to earn points to climb the leaderboard.”
    Master of Grief: “Collect Essence in Grief to earn points to climb the leaderboard.”

    Earn points by slaying all types of undead! As you’d expect, you receive more points for dispatching the harder zombie types. This, in turn, causes you to climb the Zombies leaderboard, and once the Event is over, rewards will be granted based on your leaderboard position. Everyone receives some kind of reward, but to obtain the really good stuff, it’s time to perfect your Special and Elite Zombies slaying! 
    Season 04 brings new Bundles to the Store, including a special crossover event with Ballerina. Get more intel in the Season 04 BlackCell, Battle Pass, and Bundles blog arriving before launch.
    Tracer Pack: Ballerina

    Choose one of two Operator Skins for Eve, a red sequin dress as “Eve Macarro” or a sleek black professional fit as the “Ruska Rogue.” Bring light to the darkness with three Legendary Weapon Blueprints featuring High Table Coin Tracers and High Table Coin Death FX: the “Relevé” AK-74 Assault Rifle, “Plié” Saug SMG, and the “Arabesque” 9MM PM Pistol. For a snazzier elimination, take them out with the “Dance With Death” Finishing Move.
    Balance lethality and elegance with additional Ballerina themed content, including the “Pirouette” Emote, “Keepsake” Weapon Charm, animated “Caged Grace” Emblem, animated “Pas de Duex Calling Card, and the “Take a Bow” Loading Screen.
    Tracer Pack: Ink and Smoke Reactive Ultra Skin

    Add some class to your deployments with the cel-shaded, black and greyscale “Hardboiled” Ultra Operator Skin for Weaver, accompanied by the Reactive “Lethal Inspection” AMES 85 Assault Rifle and “Personal Detective” ASG-89 Shotgun Weapon Blueprints, both featuring Noir Tracers and Ink Annihilation Death FX. For a closer finish, leap for their throats using the “Wire Cut” Finishing Move.
    When taking on the undead, equip the “Search Engine” Wonder Weapon skin for the Thrustodyne M23 and show off your Zombies credentials with the “Sidepiece” Weapon Charm, “Dead Noir” Weapon Sticker, “Evidence” Spray, “Greyscale” Loading Screen, and the consumable Time Out GobbleGum.
    Other Incoming Bundles

    There’s plenty more awesome new content arriving in the Season 04 Store, including the “Tracer Pack: Olympus Bolt Mastercraft Ultra Skin” Bundle, featuring an electrifying Mastercraft Weapon Blueprint for the new LC10 SMG alongside a divine Ultra Operator Skin for Caine. Also incoming is the “Tracer Pack: System Breach” Bundle, and the “Tracer Pack: The Goat Ultra Skin” Bundle with a Goat Companion Finishing Move. See more of the season’s upcoming Bundles and more in the Season 04 BlackCell, Battle Pass, and Store Bundle blog.

    Call of Duty League, the pinnacle of competitive Call of Duty, is bringing its fourth and final Major of the season to the DreamHack Dallas show floor. Guests with a CDL add-on ticket can watch Major IV live, where the 12 Call of Duty League teams will battle it out for the final CDL points to qualify for 2025 Call of Duty League Championship in June.
    Ensure you get into the action by tuning in and watching Major IV live on YouTube. Be sure to link your YouTube account with your Activision ID Account to earn some special viewership rewards. Click here for more intel.
    The event starts at 10:300 AM PT Friday, May 23, and continuing at 10:30 AM PT Saturday May 24 with the Finals beginning at 10:30 AM PT Sunday May 25. 

    Black Ops 6 is available now, and now’s definitely the time to experience the spy action thriller Campaign, the in-depth tactical chaos of best-in-class Multiplayer, and to soak in the gory glory of an incredible round-based Zombies experience with five maps and the brand-new Grief mode! Click here to Purchase Black Ops 6.

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    Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 and Warzone Season 04: Full Intel Revealed!
    Old Enemies, New Alliances: Black Ops 6 Season 04 is Here! Though he once had the chance to end Vikhor “Stitch” Kuzmin’s reign of terror, Adler spared his nemesis after they met at the culmination of Black Ops Cold War. Latest intel reveals Kuzmin was later captured and locked up in an Icelandic CIA black site until he might prove useful. Following the events and evidence uncovered by the deceased CIA Agent Jason Hudson, that day has come, and in an unlikely team up, Adler and team have broken Stitch out from his confinement, seeking his help to crack the codenames needed to find the Pantheon moles. With Verdansk once again an area of operations for deployment, what other plans might Stitch have in store? For now, Adler needs him to complete the mission at hand.  To succeed, the two must put their past behind them in pursuit of a new goal. Get in on the action when this stacked offering of free and premium content comes to Call of Duty®: Black Ops 6, launching in Season 04 on Thursday, May 29 at 9AM PT across all platforms. Nomenclature Note: Throughout the blog, you’ll see references to when gameplay content launches. Here are what these various suffixes mean: “Launch”: Expect to access this content immediately at the Season launch “Launch Window”: Expect to access this content between launch and up to 72 hours after launch.  “In Season”: Expect to access this content during the season, but before either the mid-season or next season arrives. “Mid-Season”: Expect to access this content at Mid-Season or later. All content timing may be subject to change. Multiplayer Content Summary Five MP Maps: Drop into Icelandic AOs with three new maps at launch including the Shutdown and Fugitive 6v6 Core maps and the Blitz Strike map. In the mid-season, party it up in Eclipse and play a reimagined Fringe. New and Returning Modes: Pick up dog tags to drain the enemy’s reserves in Team Elimination, a fun new twist on the Kill Confirmed formula. Make every bullet count with the return of One in the Chamber and get festive in the Party Ops Limited-Time Mode. Additional Equipment: The Grim Reaper Scorestreak returns from the original Black Ops, offering an explosive payload that’s guaranteed to blow the competition sky high. Season 04 Ranked Play: Challenge the best of the best, get those wins, and climb the Ranks in a new season of Multiplayer Ranked Play, with all-new rewards and bragging rights. ShutdownBrand-New, Core, 6v6, Small-Sized Before breaking out Stitch, Adler and team first need to cut off the power to the black site prison, bringing them to a hydroelectric plant built on the rugged volcanic terrain of Iceland. Fight in and around the central building housing the now wrecked Turbine or dive down the Sluice into the Lake, its waters hugging the plant’s south end by the Transformers. Jump up by the red container to target enemies from far out or swim back onshore to reach the Atrium and Parking. Head to the north side to fight in the rugged Yard, away from the shoreline and bookended by the Pumphouse and Canteen. It’s a quick run to the Turbine from here, giving you good map coverage down the middle. If things get too hot, you can always drop down the Chute and swim your way to safety.  FugitiveBrand-New, Core, 6v6, Medium-Sized Deploy to a secret CIA black site in a remote part of Iceland, the very location where Stitch has been imprisoned until Adler brings him in as an unlikely ally for an urgent operation. With the power out, Adler and his crew seize their chance to infiltrate the prison, climbing, zipping, and battling their way through the frozen compound. Upon reaching their target, Adler and Stitch strike a deal. Following the jailbreak, the alarms are blaring and warnings of a power failure light up the Cell Block. Though the area may appear smaller than expected when first glancing at the minimap, the prison’s intricate layout presents multiple levels and shortcuts to the various outside areas including the Checkpoint, Courtyard, and Recreation Yard. In the upper Cell Block, newly opened cells present the danger of ambush. Be on guard and look for ziplines for quick access to your next target. BlitzBrand-New, Strike, 6v6/2v2, Small-Sized Traffic comes to a halt as Pantheon reinforcements race toward the prison but get ambushed by the Rogue team. Leave the road and seek out targets over the rugged terrain of the Cliffside or move inland, ambushing enemies at the Waterfall. To approach the battle head on, move down the central Bridge, using the scattered convoy for cover. Jump down from the center to move underneath the Bridge, a great means of pivoting to a new location. Though a small map overall, Blitz’s long lanes leave room for marksmen to shine. EclipseBrand-New, Strike, 6v6/2v2, Small-Sized Stitch and the team arrive in Avalon, slipping into the shadows of an underground nightclub to discuss business. The neon lights flicker as they form a plan to break the Pantheon codenames, but the meeting is cut short when Pantheon agents storm in. Show off your best moves on the dance floor, dodging shots and flanking targets down the sides where seating offers party goers a chance to rest and order a drink from the bar. Ambush passing enemies from the DJ booth and then break through the broken façades on the walls, escaping into the halls. FringeRemaster, Core, 6v6, Medium-Sized Revisit Fringe from Call of Duty: Black Ops 3, reimagined for the first time ever in Black Ops 6. Attend the grand opening of the Rolling Hills distillery, established in an idyllic setting with several navigable buildings and the surrounding grounds. Battle along the main Road or dive into the Bar for a closer fight. Watch for sharpshooters in the upper Barn and along the Bridge and relive the thrill of trying to make it out alive through the narrow Loading route. The first half of Season 04 brings two exciting Multiplayer modes: Team Elimination and One in the Chamber. In the mid-season, loosen up in the Party Ops Limited Time Mode. Team EliminationIn this twist on Kill Confirmed, two teams are given a limited amount of lives each round as they fight to be the last surviving team. Players drop a dog tag on death that can be picked up by the enemy to confirm the kill or by a teammate to deny the opposing team. Survive longer than the other team or hold the most remaining lives when the timer ends to win the round. Balance aggression and defense as you seek out enemy dog tags while preserving your life. Dig in with your teammates to counter enemy attacks and then ask for cover while you collect the droppings. Picking up tags is a great way to earn your next Scorestreak, so stay aggressive and keep up the momentum. Once your team’s life pool is drained, your remaining teammates can still revive you where you were last killed in a last-ditch effort to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. One in the ChamberAnother Black Ops fan-favorite mode returns as One in the Chamber shows up in Season 04! In this free-for-all mode, each Operator is given one pistol, one bullet, a knife, and three lives. Precision is king, as bullets always eliminate on impact and the only way to earn another bullet is to get an elimination. Stay cool, aim true, and preserve your lives while aiming for the highest score. UAV scans keep the action moving, so don’t try to hide. At the end of the match, the top three scoring Operators will step up to the Winner’s Circle. Party OpsGet the party started with a new Limited-Time Mode arriving later in the season: Compete in a randomized set of party themed minigames. The player with the highest score at the end of the match wins it all. The devastating Grim Reaper Scorestreak is back from the original Black Ops, unleashing massive hits on other Operators and Scorestreaks alike. New Scorestreak Scorestreak: Grim ReaperType: Lethal Score: 725 Mastery Badges: Yes Powerful semi-automatic launcher that can fire up to four rockets in one load. Wield the Grim Reaper, a quad tube loaded Launcher capable of inflicting heavy damage on enemies. Whether targeting Operators or locking on to enemy Scorestreaks, the Grim Reaper’s payload delivers a huge explosion. The weapon is lost if you’re taken out, so save it for the right moment and bring backup to ensure you have the protection needed to unleash havoc.  Season 04 Ranked Play Overview Prove you’re the very best by dedicating your Multiplayer match time to Ranked Play, using the same settings, maps, modes, and weapon restrictions used by the Call of Duty League™. Win matches to earn SRand progress through the Ranks while earning career rewards like Rank Skins and Win Challenge rewards. As usual, match wins ensure you progress through the Ranks throughout Season 04 to earn new seasonal rewards like a new Pro Issue Weapon Blueprint, Rank-themed Calling Cards, Ranked Charms, and more: Season 04 Ranked Play Rewards Get 10 Wins: “Pro Reissue AMES 85” AMES 85 Weapon Blueprint Get 100 Wins: “Ranked Season 4 – 100 Wins” Large Decal Silver: “Ranked Season 4 – Silver” Calling Card Gold: “Ranked Season 4 – Gold” Calling Card and Charm Platinum: “Ranked Season 4 – Platinum” Calling Card and Charm Diamond: “Ranked Season 4 – Diamond” Calling Card and Charm Crimson: “Ranked Season 4 – Crimson” Calling Card and Charm Iridescent: “Ranked Season 4 – Iridescent” Calling Card and Charm Top 250: “Ranked Season 4 – Top 250” Calling Card and Charm Season 04 Champion: “Ranked Season 4 – Top 250 Champion” Calling Card Note: Multiplayer Events: Check the General section later in this blog to uncover the full complement of events for this mode across Season 04. Zombies Content Summary Grief Returns! Drop into this epic 4v4 competitive battle on all maps, outlasting the opposition while securing Capture Zones to debuff and Grief your opponents. The last team still standing wins! Additional Gameplay Content: Crack open the armored undead and create area-of-effect explosions with the Shatter Blast Ammo Mod, chew over the impressive effects of three new GobbleGums, and create even bigger explosions with the Grim Reaper Support launcher. New Modes and More: Unlock hidden rewards with more Dark Ops Challenges, then prepare to face down a powered-up Abomination, survive as long as you can in the Starting Room LTM, and prove your Leaderboard worth by zombie slaying for bragging rights and rewards! 4v4 competitive mode where two teams outwit and outlast each other. Capture zones to debuff enemies. No damage against other players. Respawns every third round. Available Maps: Liberty Falls, Terminus, Citadelle des Morts, The Tomb, Shattered Veil. Restricted: Wonder Weapons, GobbleGums: Exit Strategy, Idle Eyes, Wonderbar!, Time Out, and Flavor Hex.  Not seen since Black Ops 2, Grief returns to Zombies! This fan-favorite mode pits two teams of four against each other, with both sides vying to out-survive the other. As the battlelines are drawn between S.A.M. and Director Richtofen, each team pledges their support to one of these rivals at the start of a match, subsequently receiving handler comms support from one of them throughout the ensuing chaos. Indirect PvP Combat The action is almost immediate as both teams drop into either side of the same Grief Arena within the chosen Zombies map, and indirect PvP combat comes into effect: The two teams of four players can’t outright kill members of the enemy team, but can interact with them by body-blocking, or slowing them  by using melee, bullet-based weapons, or projectiles.  Victory Conditions: The winning team is the one that manages to “Grief” their rivals into being killed or entering a downed state. As long as one or more team members are upright, the match continues! Grief Arena Features The action is constant and can get incredibly chaotic, due in part to your proximity to your opponents and the hordes of undead encroaching on your team, thanks to the Arena being a sub-section of the main Zombies map. These are known as “Grief Arenas.” Within a Grief Arena are a variety of features: An Open Environment: Grief Arenas are clearly defined areas where any critical doors have already been opened, and the power will already have been turned on. All other Door Buys are inactive. Both teams spawn on opposite sides of the Arena, each in a group of four. Player Respawning: Any team members that are downed – provided one or more of their team are still alive – can be revived at any time, though rival teams, undead enemies, and Shock Charges can hamper this action! Additionally, a Wave Respawner triggers every third round, automatically reviving any eliminated teammates from both teams. Join In Progress: Any player not in the game can join up until Round 10 has been completed and has a small grace period to orient themselves before they’re swarmed by zombies. Additionally, if a team has won back-to-back Capture Zones, join-in-progress is not available. Essence and Salvage: Unlike in Standard playlists, Salvage pickups in Grief are worth 100 Salvage, visible to all players, and can only be picked up by the first player to grab it. Zombies: Rounds will progress faster than usual and the amount of zombies per round has been increased to account for 8 players! All undead entities – except for bosses – are to be expected. If players fail to kill zombies, the round will turn. Core Mechanics: The Arsenal, Pack-a-Punch, Mystery Box, Crafting Tables, Perk machines, GobbleGum machine, Armor Wall Buys, and Der Wunderfizz machine are available in a Grief Arena where they normally reside, or in a new location if they don’t normally exist in this portion of their respective maps. Note: While the current GobbleGum restrictions are in place to keep matches dynamic yet balanced, additional restrictions may be made in the future as the developers keep an eye on game balance, similar to Ranked Play. Capture Zones: Appearing at a regular cadence during a match, these are smaller areas within a Grief Arena where players are required to stand and earn specific types of kills to trigger a Grief  on the opposing team. Plan A: Survive! Plan B: Capture Zones! Keeping your team upright and focused on undead slaying for longer than your rivals is the main plan in this mode. However, there’s an important secondary focus you need to plan for: Capturing zones and “Griefing” your rival team! Capture Zones appear at regular intervals throughout a match, and after stepping through the glowing perimeter, you and your team can secure the Zone by staying inside it and dispatching zombies. Beckon your crew into a Zone to quicken the zombie slaying, and once your kill count meets the requirement, a Grief is triggered on the opposition. Note that if neither team reaches this requirement within the countdown inside a Capture Zone, the Grief is applied to both teams. What is a Grief? It’s a temporary debuff, penalty, or negative gameplay mechanic that you can inflict on your rival team at a Capture Zone. The type of Grief is shown at the objective tracker within a Capture Zone. Here are the possible Griefs you’re aiming to inflict on your foes: Weapon Nerf: The affected players inflict considerably reduced damage to zombie enemies. Ammo Drain: All ammo-based weapons, including those stowed, receive an ammo drain with bullets or shells being removed constantly while the Grief is active. Zombie Ambush: An Elite zombie is summoned, and it solely focuses its killing power on the enemy team until either the Elite or the team are defeated, or the timer runs out. Weapon Carousel: The rival players’ weapons are randomly swapped every few seconds. Frozen: This Grief reduces the enemy players’ movement, along with frost and ice coating the characters. Griefs and Capture Zones also introduce new score types, including: Capture Zone Kill: Awarded to a player who defeated a zombie type during a successful Capture Zone completion. Capture Zone Win: Awarded to all players on a team who successfully commandeer a Capture Zone. Capture Zone Elite Kill: Awarded to a player who slays an Elite spawned in a Capture Zone. Available Grief ArenasA total of 11 different Grief Arenas are available in this mode. Here’s a list along with a brief description of the points of interest within each one: Liberty Falls Arena 1: Pump & Pay, Motor Lodge, and Fuller’s Liberty Lanes Liberty Falls Arena 2: Dark Aether Church, Cemetery, Hilltop Terminus Arena 1: Bio Lab Terminus Arena 2: Crab Island  Citadelle des Morts Arena: Courtyard, Ramparts, and Entrance Hall The Tomb Arena 1: Dig Site, Mausoleum The Tomb Arena 2: Dark Aether Nexus Shattered Veil Arena 1: Garden Pond, Lower Terrace Shattered Veil Arena 2: Upper Terrace, Shem’s Henge, Motor Court Shattered Veil Arena 3: Mansion Foyer, Overlook, East Foyer, Library Shattered Veil Arena 4: West Hallways, Southwest Balcony, Bottlery Access the following new content within all five Zombies Mapsthroughout Season 04: Dark Ops ChallengesA mysterious new set of hidden Calling Cards and bounteous amounts of XP are available at the start of Season 04, thanks to a fresh drop of Zombies Dark Ops Challenges. Who knows... maybe there’s even one for Grief. All further information is]. New LTM: Starting RoomInspired by the starting room in the classic “Moon” Zombies map, drop in with up to three of your Zombies crew into a more straightforward but challenging experience where you’re locked into the first zone of a map. Raptor One is gone, and those undead hordes are only getting stronger, but all doors in the initial zone are locked. Survive to the highest round you can! New LTM: Abomination ChallengeEnter a warped version of Liberty Falls during this new Mid-Season Event, and hunt down an ultra-powered-up Abomination. Perhaps it’s wise to bring backup. Wreck even the most battle-hardened undead threat with the explosive power of the Shatter Blast Ammo Mod, then drop even more devastating firepower on the hordes with the Grim Reaper Support launcher. There’s three new chewables, too! Ammo Mod: Shatter BlastAvailable: Augments Menu, and In-Game“Bullets deal explosive damage. Each bullet has a chance to create an explosion that destroys armor.” Modify your ammunition to explode the toughened armor of certain normal and Special undead enemies. This mod also has a second benefit, creating an area-of-effect blast radius at the same time, whether any armor is shattered or not.  Due to the somewhat chaotic nature of this modification, there is a random chance of the Shatter Blast effect triggering, and it won’t happen every time you fire. Also expect a cooldown period after the effect. Note that Shatter Blast doesn’t directly affect Elite enemies, but area-of-effect explosions can still damage them. You are wise to wrangle your undead into hordes so they’re near each other, to really inflict some damage! Shatter Blast: Major Augments Research the following Augments to further customize this Ammo Mod. Big Game Shatter Blast can be used against Elite enemies. Expect an impressively sized explosion. Blast Chain On explosion, three additional explosions occur in rapid succession. Blast Repair For every enemy that has its armor destroyed by Shatter Blast, armor health will be restored for the player. Shatter Blast: Minor Augments Blast Zone Increase the size of the explosion. Blast Boost Increase the explosion damage. Blast Wave Normal enemies are knocked down by the explosion. New GobbleGumsCrack your teeth on three new GobbleGums, available across all maps once you earn or unlock them and equip them in your GobbleGum Loadout Pack. Explosive Flourish: Reloading your weapon creates an explosion around you. GobbleGum lasts 2 minutes. Flavor Hex: Activates a random Ultra GobbleGum. Rainburps: Zombies killed belch sparkly rainbow bubbles. Lasts 3 minutes. Additional Support Weapon: Grim ReaperAvailable: Rivals Event reward Salvage: 2000 Hammer away at the Crafting Table and assemble a powerful semi-automatic launcher known as the Grim Reaper, which deals out lethal damage to the undead with up to a quartet of missiles fired in one load. With a capacity to carry up to a dozen rockets, and the ability to fire them individually or as a quartet of devastation, this can level a courtyard of undead with a single launch! Unlock this Support weapon once you’ve earned it via the Rivals Event. Note: Zombies Events: Check the General section later in this blog to uncover a first look at events for this mode across Season 04, including the King of the Dead Leaderboard challenge! Call of Duty: Warzone Content Summary New Point of Interest: The towering skyscraper known as The Overlook comes to Downtown Verdansk, with ziplines, cranes, and an impressive interior to explore. New and Limited Time Modes: Clash mode – the massive 52v52 Verdansk Deathmatch – is back! Join 51 other Operators in a chaotic firefight to claim domination points and defeat foes. Then compete in a specially themed area of Verdansk in a match with rule-bending modifiers in Havoc Royale. And drop into Rebirth Island for a spot of Resurgence Casual human and bot combat. Doubling Down on Ranked Play: Call of Duty: Warzone doubles down – literally – with two separate Ranked Play modes; Battle Royale: Rankedat launch running throughout the entire season, and the return of Ranked Play to Rebirth Island at Mid-season. New Features: Cranes and horizontal ziplines Downtown. Lobby Lockdown in The Overlook. Look up and look out!  Dominate foes with a gigantic new skyscraper point of interest, available to Operators within the vicinity of Downtown! The old tenement blocks, Burger Town, and SKN Comm tower have been demolished, and construction crews are finalizing a sprawling skyscraper that dominates the landscape! Look for a full recon tour below. Recon Tour: The Overlook As construction nears completion on this behemoth of a skyscraper, it’s worth gaining a tactical advantage on this monolithic new point of interest. The Overlook Footprint: The “Diamond” and Perimeter Security Checkpoints Drop into the grounds of The Overlook, and you’ll immediately see the grounds of the new skyscraper under construction stretch in a rough diamond shape around the location of the old SKN Comm Tower. Flanked by two massive cranes, the building plot perimeter runs from the corner of the main bank, clockwise past the Post Office, passing the Rothwynn Donna building, northeast to the Museum/Art Gallery, and follows the road around to City Hall.  All the older structureshave been bulldozed in the name of progress! Perimeter Security Checkpoints Military-style security checkpoints have been set up on the corners and roads of the plot of land within the footprint of the structure. Most aren’t secure enough to impede vehicular progress, and some have ramps to allow airborne access. These serve as helpful visual cues that you’re entering the new POI, The Overlook.  Ground Level: Construction Sites Most of the groundwork around the skyscraper is in its final stages of completion, but there are plenty of barriers, fencing, canopies, and containers to use as cover in the area below each of the two giant cranes north and south of the structure. Ground Level: Restaurants Burger Town: Fans of the famous Burger Town Double Cheeseburger will be thrilled to know the fast-food chain has relocated a few meters further down the road from its previous location and is contained within the massive footprint of The Overlook. This outlet also serves as a lower entrance into the grand foyer interior of the building. Sushi Bar: Diagonally opposite the Burger Town, on the northwest side of the POI, is a small Sushi bar, within the footprint of the tower itself. Nestled in the stepped courtyard, you can quickly advance to the north crane or main lobby entrance. It’s also worth pointing out that the sight lines around this POI have significantly changed since Season 03, with much greater visibility across familiar POIs within Downtown and the surrounding districts. North and South Cranes Two huge cranes flank the north and south side of the monolith and are another way to traverse into The Overlook at great height. With five separate platforms attached to the mast to land on, use the vertical Ascender built into the crane’s mast and take an eight-second ascent to a platform just below the jib that extends out to the main winch, and the hoist allowing a jump to The Overlook roof. Operators who aren’t challenged by vertigo will have wild and panoramic views that extend to all of Verdansk’s POIs! Both cranes are also functional, and providing you’ve found the necessary controls in the vicinity, cargo on the hook block and hoist can be summoned and moved to various locations around the tower and nearby Downtown buildings, in case you or your team needs a daring lift! Zip Lines and Additional Rooftop Cover Increasing the ways you can quickly traverse and gaingreat height in your tactical positioning near The Overlook exterior, zip-lines provide a diagonal route to and from the surrounding Downtown building rooftops.  Each also has a small billboard or other protective cover as you reach the zipline mechanism. Access to and from Overlook at the following locations: South: Post Office rooftop to Skydeck. West: Rothwynn Donna building rooftop to Skydeck. Northeast: Art Gallery/Museum rooftop to Skydeck. East: City Hall dome rooftop to Skydeck.  The Overlook: Entrance and Lobby Lockdown The Overlook has a substantial exterior and interior presence, mainly tiered fountains, planting, and stairs up to forecourts and shuttered entrances to the north, east, south, and west, all leading to a central interior lobby. If you find the main entrances shuttered, it means the lobby is experiencing a lockdown. Perhaps there’s a way to breach this security? Are there other ways to get in? The interior lobby has a coffee shop, mezzanine office, stairs, a variety of cover options, and other areas to investigate, not least the marginally terrifying 18-storey elevator ascenders to the northeast and southwest, and even those only get you halfway up the inside of the tower. The Overlook: Atrium and SkydeckJust above the midway point within The Overlook tower is a five-floor interior with exterior Skydeck. Depending on your use of ziplines, you’re able to access a large Atrium with concrete tile and planters and an abundance of plant life. Around the perimeter are rooms, stairwells, and two new elevator shafts, all enabling you to reach the exterior Skydeck. Known by some locals as the “cyclops” tower, due to this large central upper opening you can fly a helicopter through, the Skydeck features a small glass pyramid, some windswept seating, and infiltration to the floors above.  The large, rectangular holes on all four sides provide zipline access around Downtown, as well as daring helicopter maneuvers through the gaps. The ascent doesn’t end here; enter any of the four pillars holding up the roof of the skyscraper for another elevator ascender ride. The Overlook: Penthouse, RoofThe remaining upper floors of The Overlook are nearing completion, meaning health and safety rules aren’t being observed as stringently as you’d like. Top floors up from the Skydeck is the roof. Missing windows, exterior gantries without railings, and exposed exterior ladders mean you’ll be thankful for your parachute.  Depending on which of the tower corners you’re fighting through, this offers another five floors to investigate, including rooms that are fully furnished.  These include a security and server room, a two-floor penthouse level with opulent bedroom, kitchen, and games area, and that’s before the more perturbed of Operators learn the secrets of the] room!  As well as the usual Battle Royale and Resurgence playlists across Verdansk and Rebirth Island, major modes – Clash and Battle Royale: Ranked Play – return to the game, with the intriguing Havoc Royale and the arrival of Resurgence: Ranked Play on Rebirth Island at mid-season! Clash LTM104 players, 15-minute matches 52v52 Team Deathmatch chaos is back in Call of Duty: Warzone! First introduced into Call of Duty: Warzone during Season Five of Black Ops Cold War back in September 2021 as a revamped version of the original “Rumble” mode, Clash is back, bigger than ever, and now includes some impressive, game-changing equipment and power-ups only available in this mode. But what is Clash Mode? This is Team Deathmatch and Domination on a massive scale! Overview, Win Conditions, and Scoring This action-packed team-based mode takes place in and around a specific POI within Verdansk, and pits two teams of 52 playersagainst each other. With no Circle Collapse, no last stand benefit for the Survivor Perk, and your Loadouts available immediately, the plan is simple; your side needs to acquire 500 points by the end of the 15-minute time limit. These are mainly gained by slaying enemies, completing contracts, and participating in the in-game Public Events, as well as the following: Scoring: 1 point per enemy elimination 2 points per enemy elimination with Double Down Power Up 5 points per Contract completed 10 points for capturing a Domination Point10 points for capturing a Bonus Crate or a Cash Crate Clash: Available Locations Expect Clash matches to occur across a sub-section of the main Verdansk map, incorporating several adjacent areas around the following POIs: Quarry Boneyard Farmland PromenadeClash: Available Vehicles With the impetus to reach the enemy forces never more important, expect heavy use of vehicles throughout a Clash Match. The full complement of currently available ground and air vehicles are as follows: Heli Cargo Truck LTVPolaris RZR Pro R 4 Available Contracts There are three available Contracts to complete in Clash Mode: Scavenger Search and Destroy Recon The Scavenger and Recon Contracts work in the same way as they do in Battle Royale Matches. In addition to the usual rewards and in-game cash, you receive five team points for each Contract completed. Search and Destroy Contracts: Everything must go with this new contract, where one team plants a bomb on a Buy Station, and on detonation, they can earn impressive rarity weapons and items from the Buy Stations’ inventory. The other teams can defuse the bomb to earn a Fire Sale for a major discount from the Buy Stations.  Expect the Search and Destroy Contract to be available in Battle Royale, Resurgence, and Plunder Modes, at Mid-Season. In-Match Events and Domination Points During a Clash match, expect several in-match Events to occur. These are like those in Battle Royale Matches, though Clash Events are timed throughout the match rather than related to the Circle Collapse. The available Events are: Domination Points Bonus Points Crates Clash Firesale Cash Crates Power Surge Domination Points Event: Up to three single capture Dom Pointsappear on the map, and these respawn throughout the match. Much like the Multiplayer Mode of the same name, a team that reaches and captures one of the Dom Points receives a reward; in this case, 10 team points. Bonus Points Crates Event: A cargo plane flies across the center of the map, and up to four crates are dropped. Teams are likely to head to the crates as they float to the ground, as capturing a crate awards you with 10 team points. Clash Firesale Event: For the next two minutes, all players can take advantage of a Firesale as two Portable Buy Stations are dropped into the backfield of each team. Additionally, all loot crates are restocked and cash found in crates is also increased.  Cash Crates: Capture oneof the three Cash Crates that drop during this event also nets you 10 team points. Power Surge Event: For the next two minutes, there’s an increased drop rate of Power Ups when you dispatch an enemy player or loot any ground caches. Clash Mode Gameplay Features As well as the previously mentioned new Search and Destroy Contract, Clash comes loaded with features unique to the mode. Here’s the full run-down of what to expect: Buy Stations: Expect Buy Stations to be scattered across a Clash map and roughly split between each team’s area of operations. Portable Buy Stations are also available during the Firesale In-Match Event. Here’s what you can purchase: Armor Plate: Munitions Box: Trophy System: Counter UAV: Sentry Turret: Hand Cannon: Bunker Buster: Cluster Strike: Precision Airstrike: Specialist Perk: New Field Upgrade: Door Barricade: Control access points more easily during mid or close-quarter combat scenarios and delay enemy incursions with the Door Barricade. Fit a barricade to a close single or double door, and a heavy-duty lock attaches toboth sides, preventing the opening or access through the door. This is until the barricade is either removed, or destroyed, usually by using explosives, though gunfire and melee equipment is also an option. Expect the Door Barricade to be loot in Battle Royale and Battle Royale Casual Modes, via the new Care Package Killstreak, all coming at Mid-Season. New Killstreak: Hand Cannon: This high-powered pistol Killstreak, originally available in Multiplayer during Season 01, is available in ground cache as rare loot. Expect a slow rate of fire and finite ammunition, but good handling, and improved hip fire accuracy with faster hip-fire shooting speed. Expect the Hand Cannon to be rare loot in Battle Royale, Battle Royale Casual, Resurgence, and Plunder Modes, via the new Care Package Killstreak, all coming at Mid-Season. Feature: SAM Turrets: Chopper and drone pilots take note; Clash mode maps feature SAM Turrets in various tactical positions across the environment. Spend of in-match cash to activate these anti-air missile batteries and use them up to four times to target any aircraft and drones in the area. If you’re flying in the Heli on the receiving end of a SAM barrage, now’s the time to utilize flares to counter the incoming missiles! Train: If a Clash map features a portion of the large, circular railroad track that the train travels along, then this hulking engine and loot-filled carriages are parked and available to use as added cover and looting opportunities. UAV Towers: Providing you have the in-match cash to activate them, teams can head to and capture a few scattered UAV Towers, allowing pinging of enemy movement across the local area. Clash Mode Powerups  Clash Mode features five differently hued in-match Powerups that are automatically used when found. Available as a possible loot drop or sometimes appearing as dropped loot near the body of an eliminated enemy Operator, these Powerups are color-coded and offer temporary benefits to the Operator who grabs them. All five can be obtained in a single match and expect the frequency of available Powerups to be significantly increased if the in-match Power Surge Event activates. Here’s what each of the five Clash Powerups grant you: Hunter: Highlights enemies and allies in red and blue respectively. Allies are visible through walls. Applies Tracker and High Alert Perks. Speed Boost: Prevents fall damage and provides approximately 20 percent speed boost to your movement. Regeneration Aura: Refills your health and armor at roughly 20 percent per second. Allies within a small radius around you also receive this benefit. The effect does not stack. Double Down: Grants you two points per enemy Operator elimination instead of one. Kill Mag: Refills your active weapon magazine after a kill and quickens your reload. Havoc Royale LTM44 players, 15-minute matches Compete in a Call of Duty: Warzone match like no other, where rule bending modifiers twist the realities of the usual Resurgence gameplay in chaotic and game-changing ways.  Drop into a specially themed area of Verdansk with your Loadout. Every new gas circle activates a different modifier. Adapt fast to sudden changes as Havoc modifiers may impact you, the environment, and even the gameplay rules. Survive the Havoc, be the last team standing, and claim victory! Expect a full rundown of this game mode in the Season 04 Reloaded blog, just prior to Mid-season. Resurgence Casual44 Players, Players & Bots Infil into Rebirth Island with your squad and commit to winning using the regular Resurgence ruleset, but with one important twist; some of your adversaries aren’t human! Whether facing down a bot or not, Resurgence Casual is a great mode to drop into whether you’re warming up, teaching a new player about the game, or you’re wanting a Resurgence match that isn’t quite as extreme as normal. As with Battle Royale Casual or Call of Duty: Warzone Bootcamp, game progression is limited in this mode and results will not count towards or against your stats. This mode also doesn’t count towards your eligibility to accessing Resurgence Ranked Play when it arrives at Mid-Season. Grind your way towards a coveted position in the Top 250 as Battle Royale: Ranked Play becomes the first of two Ranked Play variants to drop in Season 04 within Call of Duty: Warzone. Harness the competitive spirit and earn new rewards for ranking up and advancing through the Skill Divisions, unlocking the following rewards as you go: Season 04 BR Ranked Play Rewards First Season Win: Weapon Charm Get 25 Eliminations: Elimination Sticker Get 100 Eliminations: Elimination Weapon Camo Get 250 Eliminations: Elimination LR 7.62 Weapon Blueprint Silver: “Ranked Season 4 – Silver” Emblem Gold: “Ranked Season 4 – Gold” Emblem and Decal Platinum: “Ranked Season 4 – Platinum” Emblem and Decal Diamond: “Ranked Season 4 – Diamond” Emblem and Decal Crimson: “Ranked Season 4 – Crimson” Emblem and Decal Iridescent: “Ranked Season 4 – Iridescent” Emblem and Decal Top 250: “Ranked Season 4 – Top 250” Emblem and Decal Season 04 Champion: “Ranked Season 4 – Top 250 Champion” Emblem Ranked Play: ResurgenceTrios, Rebirth Island Craving some real competition on Rebirth Island? Then squad up with your winning Trio, and attempt dominance over the very best players as Resurgence Ranked Play makes its triumphant return! Expect the same rules set you remember during the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare® III era, and an expanded look at this returning, fan-favorite mode in the Season 04 Reloaded blog, just prior to Mid-season. Ranked Play Notes: Battle Royale: Ranked Playruns from Launch Window throughout the entirety of Season 04. Resurgence: Ranked Playbegins at Mid-Season, and runs alongside Battle Royale: Ranked Play, meaning you can play one or both Modes when they are active. The ranking is separate from Battle Royale: Ranked Play. A new Contract, Field Upgrade, Killstreak, Perk, and ATV are all set to drop into Verdansk during Season 04: Clash Mode Features ExpansionAfter an evaluation period in Call of Duty: Warzone’s Clash Mode, expect the following new equipment to become available across additional modes at mid-season. Here’s what to expect: Contract: Search & Destroy: Battle Royale, Resurgence, Plunder. Field Upgrade: Door Barricade: Battle Royale, Battle Royale Casual Modes. Available via Care Package. Killstreak: Hand Cannon: Battle Royale, Battle Royale Casual, and Plunder Modes. Available via Care Package. Killstreak: Care PackageOpen ground loot caches for a rare chance to obtain the Care Package, a throwable Killstreak that, when lobbed, explodes into trail of smoke, after which a loadout-sized crate falls from the skies. Open this crate for a chance to obtain rare loot including rare equipment, the Specialist Perk, and more. New Perk: Loot MasterAvailable only as Ground Loot during Resurgence and Plunder matches, the Loot Master Perk allows you to maximize your scavenging potential and gear up faster by increasing the amount of loot you find while opening caches. Gain the early advantage or sustain yourself during prolonged engagements. Expect an increased drop rate for equipped weapon ammo, a higher chance to find tacticals and lethals, more cash, and a greater chance at field upgrades, killstreaks, and other high-tier gear. ATV: Polaris Sportsman XP 1000Added to the vehicle pool is the Polaris Sportsman XP 1000, a real wild ride allowing you to hit the Verdansk goat trails in comfort with legendary suspension, great clearance and traction, and versatility for positioning up to three Operators on the surface of the vehicle. Compared to the current ATV, the wheelbase and size of the Sportsman XP 1000 offers more stability than ever before.  Note: Call of Duty: Warzone Events: Check the General section later in this blog to uncover the full complement of events for this mode across Season 04. General ContentCall of Duty: General Content SummaryWeapons Detail: Five new weapons arrive in Season 04, including two at launch: the LC10 SMG and FFAR 1 Assault Rifle. Later in the season, get your hands on the , Essex Model 07 Marksman Rifle, Olympia Special weapon and Pickaxe Melee weapon, and change up your playstyle with new attachments. The Events Horizon: Season 04 is packed with Events, including Rivals, Ballerina, and even more coming mid-season.. Plus, prove your worth across the Zombies leaderboards and become King of the Dead! Battle Pass and BlackCell: The Season 04 Battle Pass brings Stitch and brutal BlackCell Operator Omen to the forefront alongside new Weapon Blueprints, Operator Skins, Calling Cards, Finishing Moves, Emotes, and more in a mix of free and premium tiers. Free tiers include two new base weapons and the G-Grip Tactical Foregrip. Season 04 Operators: Stitch returns after being freed from prison, headlining the new Battle Pass next to the sinister Omen leading BlackCell. Plus, deploy as assassin Eve Macarro in a collaboration with Ballerina, followed by much more at the mid-season. CDL Announcements: Major IV is almost here! Find out where to watch, plus the in-game rewards you can unlock, just for tuning in! Primary Weapon: LC10SMG, Battle Pass Page 3, Page 14 Battle Pass Blueprint Levels: 38 MAGS: 4 MAG SIZE: 34 Mastery Badges: Yes Attachments: Optic, Muzzle, Barrel, Underbarrel, Magazine, Rear Grip, Stock, Laser, Fire Mods Customize Options: Skins, Camos and Reticle Unlocks, Accessories, Decals, Stickers. Full-auto submachine gun. Excellent accuracy and range, with a moderate rate of fire. Average mobility and very slow handling for its class. Returning after its debut in Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War, the LC10 SMG spits out rounds fast coupled with good accuracy and range, moderate damage, and a quick reload to get you back into the fight. The weapon performs well off the hip or down sights, with 34 rounds in the base magazine for a hefty ammo supply. Via Gunsmith, equip a variety of improvements such as a Laser for improved hipfire spread and an updated Barrel to further extend the weapon’s respectable damage range. Primary Weapon: FFAR 1Assault Rifle, Battle Pass Page 6, Page 11 HVT Tier Battle Pass Blueprint Levels: 42 MAGS: 3 MAG SIZE: 30 Mastery Badges: Yes Attachments: Optic, Muzzle, Barrel, Underbarrel, Magazine, Rear Grip, Stock, Laser, Fire Mods Customize Options: Skins, Camo and Reticle Unlocks, Accessories, Decals, Stickers.  Full-auto assault rifle. Very high rate of fire and excellent CQB power, but slower handling and mobility. Boasting a blazing fast fire rate that rivals the SMG weapon class, this bullpup Assault Rifle is designed for taking down targets fast. The somewhat unpredictable recoil favors burst fire when tackling distant targets, but once you’re locked on it’s all over for them. Supporting a variety of Underbarrel Launcher attachments, use Gunsmith to add greater versatility to the weapon. Running low on ammo? Grab an Extended Mag while you’re at it. Primary Weapon: Essex Model 07Marksman Rifle, Event Reward Levels: 38 MAGS: 3 MAG SIZE: 8 Mastery Badges: Yes Attachments: Optic, Muzzle, Barrel, Underbarrel, Magazine, Lever, Stock, Laser, Fire Mods Customize Options: Skins, Camo and Reticle Unlocks, Accessories, Decals, Stickers. Lever-action marksman rifle. High damage potential. Balanced by slower rate of fire and handling. Inflict heavy critical point damage with this lever-action tactical rifle. An ideal tool for the new sheriff in town, this classic armament offers smooth handling with shots that quickly recenter after kicking up. Choose from a variety of Levers to further customize the weapon’s action, improving ADS speed, sprint to fire speed, and other movement abilities.  Special Weapon: OlympiaSpecial, Event Reward Levels: 30 MAGS: 8 MAG SIZE: 2 Mastery Badges: Yes Attachments: Barrel, Stock Customize Options: Skins, Camos, Accessories, Decals, Stickers. Double-barrel shotgun. Very high damage and respectable range but requires frequent reloading. The double-barrel Olympia – not seen since Black Ops 3 – makes its debut in Black Ops 6, returning as a Special Weapon that makes for the perfect backup when entering tight spaces. The Olympia holds two shots at a time, each spraying multiple pellets when your Operator pulls the trigger. Light customization via the Short Barrel and Cut-Off Stock attachments gives you some control over the weapon’s playstyle, but the fundamentals remain the same: get up close and make your shots count. Fire down the sight for a tighter pellet spread or shoot off the hip to inflict damage over a wider area. Melee Weapon: PickaxeMelee, Event Reward Levels: 30 Mastery Badges: Yes Attachments: None Customize Options: Skins. One-hit kill. Medium attack speed. Short range. Without a Pickaxe, you’ll be lost in the tundra. Bring the right tool for the job when deploying to Iceland in Season 04’s Multiplayer maps, starting with this deadly Melee weapon that downs unarmored enemies with brutal severity. Though its range is short, the Pickaxe’s combination of rapid slashes and overhead swipes will keep enemies frozen in their tracks. Close the distance and say farewell. G-GripSMGs, Assault Rifles, Battle Pass Page 7 Reward Vertical foregrip with integrated laser for improved firing stability, horizontal recoil control, and tightened spread when transitioning between hipfire and aiming down sights. Beam: Blue. Blocks Laser attachments. Stryder .22 3-Round Burst ModStryder .22 Pistol, Event Reward Convert the Stryder .22 into a 3-round burst. Drastically improves fire rate and maintains manageable gun kick but alters the weapon’s damage profile outside of the effective range. SVD Full Auto ModSVD Sniper Rifle, Event Reward Convert the SVD from semi-auto to full-auto functionality, ramping up the speed of your damage output and drastically improving recoil and handling. TR2 CQB Auto ConversionTR2 Marksman Rifle, Event Reward Alter the TR2 Marksman Rifle to fire handgun caliber rounds, resulting in a Marksman Rifle with a compact frame and fully automatic capabilities that rival fire rates of an SMG! Stitch Returns to Action in the Season 04 Battle Pass Stitch returns to the fray, leading this season’s Battle Pass content in a shocking team up with Adler. Purchase the Season 04 Battle Pass for 1,100 COD Points or the Season 04 Battle Pass Bundle for 2,400 COD Points to immediately unlock the Instant Rewards Page of the Battle Pass, including the following items: 10% Battle Pass XP Boost The new “Supermax” Stitch Operator and “Supermax BlackCell” Stitch Operator Skin for those who purchase BlackCell The “Lock Up” Legendary Blueprint for the Feng 82 LMG The “Try Me!” Emote The “Untamable” Large Decal Start to unlock up to 1,100 COD Points as you progress through the Battle Pass The Season 04 Battle Pass includes over 110 pieces of unlockable contentincluding two new Base Weapons, the G-Grip Tactical Foregrip Attachment, and several unlockable mil-sim style skins for Bailey, Payne, Grey, Caine, Brutus, Toro, Adler, Nazir, and Marshall. Stay tuned for the BlackCell, Battle Pass and Store Bundles blog prior to Season 04 launch for more details. BlackCell Offerings When the job needs to get done, summon Omen, the otherworldly Operator leading BlackCell content in Season 04. The menacing Operator and his three-headed guard dog are joined by a cast of infected, black and purple-hued Operator Skins and Weapon Blueprints earned exclusively through BlackCell. BlackCell owners can access the Season 04 Battle Pass via the exclusive BlackCell Page, instantly unlocking the following items: The “Omen” BlackCell Operator and Skin 10% XP Boost 1,100 COD Points The “Guard Dog” Companion Finishing Move The “Hellblock” Mastercraft Blueprint for the Ladra SMG The “Kill Tally” Gun Screen The “BlackCell” Clan TagBlackCell owners get access to page after page of additional exclusive rewards within the Season 04 Battle Pass, including: Seven BlackCell-exclusive skins for Stitch, Bailey, Payne, Caine, Brutus, and Adler.  Seven BlackCell-exclusive Weapon Blueprints for the Krig C, XMG, SWAT 5.56, ASG-98, FFAR 1, Model L, LC10Over 130 item rewardsfor those who fully complete the Season 04 BlackCell Battle Pass. As usual, players who upgrade to BlackCell after purchasing the Battle Pass will also receive back the COD Points they spent. BlackCell Daily Challenges: Players with BlackCell will receive additional Daily Challenges throughout Season 04 for Multiplayer, Zombies, and Call of Duty: Warzone, giving even more chances to rake in the XP during your play sessions! BlackCell Loyalty Bonus: Players who purchased BlackCell in a previous Black Ops 6season and go on to purchase Season 04 BlackCell will earn a permanent 10% Player and Weapon XP Loyalty Bonus, up to 30% for players who purchased Season 01, Season 02, and Season 03 BlackCell! The return of Stitch signals a shift in the battles ahead, requiring new Operators to meet the demands of the intensifying conflict. Predict a swift demise for your opponents with Omen leading BlackCell, joined by Stitch at the head of the Battle Pass plus a special appearance by Eve Macarro from Ballerina. Omen“Omen” Operator: BlackCell Instant Reward Page It’s time for lockdown. Omen is a presence who strikes fear even in the world’s most dangerous criminals, with an almost preternatural ability to keep even the most sinister prisoners in line. Stitch“Supermax” and “Yard Dog” Skins: Battle Pass Instant Reward Page, Battle Pass Completion Page Until recently, Stitch was assumed dead. Instead of eliminating his enemy, however, Adler sent him off to a black site prison. Now the time has come, and following a daring jailbreak, Stitch is once again free. Adler needs his help cracking the codenames that will finally lead to the Pantheon moles, but at what cost? BallerinaStore Bundle Seeking revenge for her slain father, Eve Macarro embarks on a relentless mission against the High Table’s most feared opponents in Ballerina, the highly anticipated new action film from the World of John Wick. Deploy as the elite assassin in one of two looks in the Ballerina Bundle arriving in Season 04. Participate in a new round of scheduled Events across Multiplayer, Zombies, and Call of Duty: Warzone. Earn rewards like new weapons, special attachments, and more. Here’s a first look at the Events to come: Event: BallerinaActivation Dates: June 5 to June 12 Total Rewards: 10Enter the world of John Wick with the new Ballerina Event. Prove your capabilities as a supreme assassin by slaying your way across Multiplayer, Zombies, and Call of Duty: Warzone. Rewards include the new Essex Model 07 Marksman Rifle and a Ballerina-themed Nunchuck Melee Blueprint for BlackCell Owners. Event: RivalsActivation Dates: June 12 to June 26 Total Rewards: 15Enemies become allies in the Rivals Event, when Stitch brings his code-cracking expertise to help uncover the real names of the final Pantheon moles in the CIA. The goal is simple; prove you’re the most proficient Operator by earning XP across all game modes and unlock a plethora of impressive free items. Dominate your enemies to become the first to unlock rewards including the Stryder .22 3-Round Burst Modand Grim Reaper. Events: King of the Dead, Master of GriefActivation Dates: June 26 to July 3 Activation Dates: July 10 to July 17 King of the Dead: “Eliminate zombies in any Zombie mode to earn points to climb the leaderboard.” Master of Grief: “Collect Essence in Grief to earn points to climb the leaderboard.” Earn points by slaying all types of undead! As you’d expect, you receive more points for dispatching the harder zombie types. This, in turn, causes you to climb the Zombies leaderboard, and once the Event is over, rewards will be granted based on your leaderboard position. Everyone receives some kind of reward, but to obtain the really good stuff, it’s time to perfect your Special and Elite Zombies slaying!  Season 04 brings new Bundles to the Store, including a special crossover event with Ballerina. Get more intel in the Season 04 BlackCell, Battle Pass, and Bundles blog arriving before launch. Tracer Pack: Ballerina Choose one of two Operator Skins for Eve, a red sequin dress as “Eve Macarro” or a sleek black professional fit as the “Ruska Rogue.” Bring light to the darkness with three Legendary Weapon Blueprints featuring High Table Coin Tracers and High Table Coin Death FX: the “Relevé” AK-74 Assault Rifle, “Plié” Saug SMG, and the “Arabesque” 9MM PM Pistol. For a snazzier elimination, take them out with the “Dance With Death” Finishing Move. Balance lethality and elegance with additional Ballerina themed content, including the “Pirouette” Emote, “Keepsake” Weapon Charm, animated “Caged Grace” Emblem, animated “Pas de Duex Calling Card, and the “Take a Bow” Loading Screen. Tracer Pack: Ink and Smoke Reactive Ultra Skin Add some class to your deployments with the cel-shaded, black and greyscale “Hardboiled” Ultra Operator Skin for Weaver, accompanied by the Reactive “Lethal Inspection” AMES 85 Assault Rifle and “Personal Detective” ASG-89 Shotgun Weapon Blueprints, both featuring Noir Tracers and Ink Annihilation Death FX. For a closer finish, leap for their throats using the “Wire Cut” Finishing Move. When taking on the undead, equip the “Search Engine” Wonder Weapon skin for the Thrustodyne M23 and show off your Zombies credentials with the “Sidepiece” Weapon Charm, “Dead Noir” Weapon Sticker, “Evidence” Spray, “Greyscale” Loading Screen, and the consumable Time Out GobbleGum. Other Incoming Bundles There’s plenty more awesome new content arriving in the Season 04 Store, including the “Tracer Pack: Olympus Bolt Mastercraft Ultra Skin” Bundle, featuring an electrifying Mastercraft Weapon Blueprint for the new LC10 SMG alongside a divine Ultra Operator Skin for Caine. Also incoming is the “Tracer Pack: System Breach” Bundle, and the “Tracer Pack: The Goat Ultra Skin” Bundle with a Goat Companion Finishing Move. See more of the season’s upcoming Bundles and more in the Season 04 BlackCell, Battle Pass, and Store Bundle blog. Call of Duty League, the pinnacle of competitive Call of Duty, is bringing its fourth and final Major of the season to the DreamHack Dallas show floor. Guests with a CDL add-on ticket can watch Major IV live, where the 12 Call of Duty League teams will battle it out for the final CDL points to qualify for 2025 Call of Duty League Championship in June. Ensure you get into the action by tuning in and watching Major IV live on YouTube. Be sure to link your YouTube account with your Activision ID Account to earn some special viewership rewards. Click here for more intel. The event starts at 10:300 AM PT Friday, May 23, and continuing at 10:30 AM PT Saturday May 24 with the Finals beginning at 10:30 AM PT Sunday May 25.  Black Ops 6 is available now, and now’s definitely the time to experience the spy action thriller Campaign, the in-depth tactical chaos of best-in-class Multiplayer, and to soak in the gory glory of an incredible round-based Zombies experience with five maps and the brand-new Grief mode! Click here to Purchase Black Ops 6. © 2025 Activision Publishing, Inc. ACTIVISION, CALL OF DUTY, CALL OF DUTY WARZONE, MODERN WARFARE, CALL OF DUTY LEAGUE, and CALL OF DUTY BLACK OPS are trademarks of Activision Publishing, Inc. All other trademarks and trade names are the property of their respective owners. For more information, please visit www.callofduty.com and www.youtube.com/callofduty, and follow @Activision and @CallofDuty on X, Instagram, and Facebook. For Call of Duty Updates, follow @CODUpdates on X. ®, TM & © 2025 Lions Gate Entertainment Inc. and related companies. All Rights Reserved. #call #duty #black #ops #warzone
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    Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 and Warzone Season 04: Full Intel Revealed!
    Old Enemies, New Alliances: Black Ops 6 Season 04 is Here! Though he once had the chance to end Vikhor “Stitch” Kuzmin’s reign of terror, Adler spared his nemesis after they met at the culmination of Black Ops Cold War. Latest intel reveals Kuzmin was later captured and locked up in an Icelandic CIA black site until he might prove useful. Following the events and evidence uncovered by the deceased CIA Agent Jason Hudson, that day has come, and in an unlikely team up, Adler and team have broken Stitch out from his confinement, seeking his help to crack the codenames needed to find the Pantheon moles. With Verdansk once again an area of operations for deployment, what other plans might Stitch have in store? For now, Adler needs him to complete the mission at hand.  To succeed, the two must put their past behind them in pursuit of a new goal. Get in on the action when this stacked offering of free and premium content comes to Call of Duty®: Black Ops 6, launching in Season 04 on Thursday, May 29 at 9AM PT across all platforms. Nomenclature Note: Throughout the blog, you’ll see references to when gameplay content launches. Here are what these various suffixes mean: “Launch”: Expect to access this content immediately at the Season launch “Launch Window”: Expect to access this content between launch and up to 72 hours after launch.  “In Season”: Expect to access this content during the season, but before either the mid-season or next season arrives. “Mid-Season”: Expect to access this content at Mid-Season or later. All content timing may be subject to change. Multiplayer Content Summary Five MP Maps: Drop into Icelandic AOs with three new maps at launch including the Shutdown and Fugitive 6v6 Core maps and the Blitz Strike map. In the mid-season, party it up in Eclipse and play a reimagined Fringe. New and Returning Modes: Pick up dog tags to drain the enemy’s reserves in Team Elimination, a fun new twist on the Kill Confirmed formula. Make every bullet count with the return of One in the Chamber and get festive in the Party Ops Limited-Time Mode. Additional Equipment: The Grim Reaper Scorestreak returns from the original Black Ops, offering an explosive payload that’s guaranteed to blow the competition sky high. Season 04 Ranked Play: Challenge the best of the best, get those wins, and climb the Ranks in a new season of Multiplayer Ranked Play, with all-new rewards and bragging rights. Shutdown (Launch) Brand-New, Core, 6v6, Small-Sized Before breaking out Stitch, Adler and team first need to cut off the power to the black site prison, bringing them to a hydroelectric plant built on the rugged volcanic terrain of Iceland. Fight in and around the central building housing the now wrecked Turbine or dive down the Sluice into the Lake, its waters hugging the plant’s south end by the Transformers. Jump up by the red container to target enemies from far out or swim back onshore to reach the Atrium and Parking. Head to the north side to fight in the rugged Yard, away from the shoreline and bookended by the Pumphouse and Canteen. It’s a quick run to the Turbine from here, giving you good map coverage down the middle. If things get too hot, you can always drop down the Chute and swim your way to safety.  Fugitive (Launch) Brand-New, Core, 6v6, Medium-Sized Deploy to a secret CIA black site in a remote part of Iceland, the very location where Stitch has been imprisoned until Adler brings him in as an unlikely ally for an urgent operation. With the power out, Adler and his crew seize their chance to infiltrate the prison, climbing, zipping, and battling their way through the frozen compound. Upon reaching their target, Adler and Stitch strike a deal. Following the jailbreak, the alarms are blaring and warnings of a power failure light up the Cell Block. Though the area may appear smaller than expected when first glancing at the minimap, the prison’s intricate layout presents multiple levels and shortcuts to the various outside areas including the Checkpoint, Courtyard, and Recreation Yard. In the upper Cell Block, newly opened cells present the danger of ambush. Be on guard and look for ziplines for quick access to your next target. Blitz (Launch) Brand-New, Strike, 6v6/2v2, Small-Sized Traffic comes to a halt as Pantheon reinforcements race toward the prison but get ambushed by the Rogue team. Leave the road and seek out targets over the rugged terrain of the Cliffside or move inland, ambushing enemies at the Waterfall. To approach the battle head on, move down the central Bridge, using the scattered convoy for cover. Jump down from the center to move underneath the Bridge, a great means of pivoting to a new location. Though a small map overall, Blitz’s long lanes leave room for marksmen to shine. Eclipse (Mid-Season) Brand-New, Strike, 6v6/2v2, Small-Sized Stitch and the team arrive in Avalon, slipping into the shadows of an underground nightclub to discuss business. The neon lights flicker as they form a plan to break the Pantheon codenames, but the meeting is cut short when Pantheon agents storm in. Show off your best moves on the dance floor, dodging shots and flanking targets down the sides where seating offers party goers a chance to rest and order a drink from the bar. Ambush passing enemies from the DJ booth and then break through the broken façades on the walls, escaping into the halls. Fringe (Mid-Season) Remaster, Core, 6v6, Medium-Sized Revisit Fringe from Call of Duty: Black Ops 3, reimagined for the first time ever in Black Ops 6. Attend the grand opening of the Rolling Hills distillery, established in an idyllic setting with several navigable buildings and the surrounding grounds. Battle along the main Road or dive into the Bar for a closer fight. Watch for sharpshooters in the upper Barn and along the Bridge and relive the thrill of trying to make it out alive through the narrow Loading route. The first half of Season 04 brings two exciting Multiplayer modes: Team Elimination and One in the Chamber. In the mid-season, loosen up in the Party Ops Limited Time Mode. Team Elimination (Launch) In this twist on Kill Confirmed, two teams are given a limited amount of lives each round as they fight to be the last surviving team. Players drop a dog tag on death that can be picked up by the enemy to confirm the kill or by a teammate to deny the opposing team. Survive longer than the other team or hold the most remaining lives when the timer ends to win the round. Balance aggression and defense as you seek out enemy dog tags while preserving your life. Dig in with your teammates to counter enemy attacks and then ask for cover while you collect the droppings. Picking up tags is a great way to earn your next Scorestreak, so stay aggressive and keep up the momentum. Once your team’s life pool is drained, your remaining teammates can still revive you where you were last killed in a last-ditch effort to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. One in the Chamber (In-Season) Another Black Ops fan-favorite mode returns as One in the Chamber shows up in Season 04! In this free-for-all mode, each Operator is given one pistol, one bullet, a knife, and three lives. Precision is king, as bullets always eliminate on impact and the only way to earn another bullet is to get an elimination. Stay cool, aim true, and preserve your lives while aiming for the highest score. UAV scans keep the action moving, so don’t try to hide. At the end of the match, the top three scoring Operators will step up to the Winner’s Circle. Party Ops (Mid-Season) Get the party started with a new Limited-Time Mode arriving later in the season: Compete in a randomized set of party themed minigames. The player with the highest score at the end of the match wins it all. The devastating Grim Reaper Scorestreak is back from the original Black Ops, unleashing massive hits on other Operators and Scorestreaks alike. New Scorestreak Scorestreak: Grim Reaper (In-Season) Type: Lethal Score: 725 Mastery Badges: Yes Powerful semi-automatic launcher that can fire up to four rockets in one load. Wield the Grim Reaper, a quad tube loaded Launcher capable of inflicting heavy damage on enemies. Whether targeting Operators or locking on to enemy Scorestreaks, the Grim Reaper’s payload delivers a huge explosion. The weapon is lost if you’re taken out, so save it for the right moment and bring backup to ensure you have the protection needed to unleash havoc.  Season 04 Ranked Play Overview Prove you’re the very best by dedicating your Multiplayer match time to Ranked Play, using the same settings, maps, modes, and weapon restrictions used by the Call of Duty League™. Win matches to earn SR (Skill Rating) and progress through the Ranks while earning career rewards like Rank Skins and Win Challenge rewards. As usual, match wins ensure you progress through the Ranks throughout Season 04 to earn new seasonal rewards like a new Pro Issue Weapon Blueprint, Rank-themed Calling Cards, Ranked Charms, and more: Season 04 Ranked Play Rewards Get 10 Wins: “Pro Reissue AMES 85” AMES 85 Weapon Blueprint Get 100 Wins: “Ranked Season 4 – 100 Wins” Large Decal Silver: “Ranked Season 4 – Silver” Calling Card Gold: “Ranked Season 4 – Gold” Calling Card and Charm Platinum: “Ranked Season 4 – Platinum” Calling Card and Charm Diamond: “Ranked Season 4 – Diamond” Calling Card and Charm Crimson: “Ranked Season 4 – Crimson” Calling Card and Charm Iridescent: “Ranked Season 4 – Iridescent” Calling Card and Charm Top 250: “Ranked Season 4 – Top 250” Calling Card and Charm Season 04 Champion: “Ranked Season 4 – Top 250 Champion” Calling Card Note: Multiplayer Events: Check the General section later in this blog to uncover the full complement of events for this mode across Season 04. Zombies Content Summary Grief Returns! Drop into this epic 4v4 competitive battle on all maps, outlasting the opposition while securing Capture Zones to debuff and Grief your opponents. The last team still standing wins! Additional Gameplay Content: Crack open the armored undead and create area-of-effect explosions with the Shatter Blast Ammo Mod, chew over the impressive effects of three new GobbleGums, and create even bigger explosions with the Grim Reaper Support launcher. New Modes and More: Unlock hidden rewards with more Dark Ops Challenges, then prepare to face down a powered-up Abomination, survive as long as you can in the Starting Room LTM, and prove your Leaderboard worth by zombie slaying for bragging rights and rewards! 4v4 competitive mode where two teams outwit and outlast each other. Capture zones to debuff enemies. No damage against other players. Respawns every third round. Available Maps: Liberty Falls, Terminus, Citadelle des Morts, The Tomb, Shattered Veil. Restricted: Wonder Weapons, GobbleGums: Exit Strategy, Idle Eyes, Wonderbar!, Time Out, and Flavor Hex (Season 04 GobbleGum).  Not seen since Black Ops 2, Grief returns to Zombies! This fan-favorite mode pits two teams of four against each other, with both sides vying to out-survive the other. As the battlelines are drawn between S.A.M. and Director Richtofen, each team pledges their support to one of these rivals at the start of a match, subsequently receiving handler comms support from one of them throughout the ensuing chaos. Indirect PvP Combat The action is almost immediate as both teams drop into either side of the same Grief Arena within the chosen Zombies map, and indirect PvP combat comes into effect: The two teams of four players can’t outright kill members of the enemy team, but can interact with them by body-blocking, or slowing them  by using melee, bullet-based weapons, or projectiles.  Victory Conditions: The winning team is the one that manages to “Grief” their rivals into being killed or entering a downed state. As long as one or more team members are upright, the match continues! Grief Arena Features The action is constant and can get incredibly chaotic, due in part to your proximity to your opponents and the hordes of undead encroaching on your team, thanks to the Arena being a sub-section of the main Zombies map. These are known as “Grief Arenas.” Within a Grief Arena are a variety of features: An Open Environment: Grief Arenas are clearly defined areas where any critical doors have already been opened, and the power will already have been turned on. All other Door Buys are inactive. Both teams spawn on opposite sides of the Arena, each in a group of four. Player Respawning: Any team members that are downed – provided one or more of their team are still alive – can be revived at any time, though rival teams, undead enemies, and Shock Charges can hamper this action! Additionally, a Wave Respawner triggers every third round, automatically reviving any eliminated teammates from both teams. Join In Progress: Any player not in the game can join up until Round 10 has been completed and has a small grace period to orient themselves before they’re swarmed by zombies. Additionally, if a team has won back-to-back Capture Zones (see below), join-in-progress is not available. Essence and Salvage: Unlike in Standard playlists, Salvage pickups in Grief are worth 100 Salvage, visible to all players, and can only be picked up by the first player to grab it. Zombies: Rounds will progress faster than usual and the amount of zombies per round has been increased to account for 8 players! All undead entities – except for bosses – are to be expected. If players fail to kill zombies, the round will turn. Core Mechanics: The Arsenal, Pack-a-Punch, Mystery Box, Crafting Tables, Perk machines, GobbleGum machine (with Exit Strategy, Idle Eyes, Wonderbar!, Time Out, and Flavor Hex restricted), Armor Wall Buys, and Der Wunderfizz machine are available in a Grief Arena where they normally reside, or in a new location if they don’t normally exist in this portion of their respective maps. Note: While the current GobbleGum restrictions are in place to keep matches dynamic yet balanced, additional restrictions may be made in the future as the developers keep an eye on game balance, similar to Ranked Play. Capture Zones: Appearing at a regular cadence during a match, these are smaller areas within a Grief Arena where players are required to stand and earn specific types of kills to trigger a Grief  on the opposing team. Plan A: Survive! Plan B: Capture Zones! Keeping your team upright and focused on undead slaying for longer than your rivals is the main plan in this mode. However, there’s an important secondary focus you need to plan for: Capturing zones and “Griefing” your rival team! Capture Zones appear at regular intervals throughout a match, and after stepping through the glowing perimeter, you and your team can secure the Zone by staying inside it and dispatching zombies. Beckon your crew into a Zone to quicken the zombie slaying, and once your kill count meets the requirement, a Grief is triggered on the opposition. Note that if neither team reaches this requirement within the countdown inside a Capture Zone, the Grief is applied to both teams. What is a Grief? It’s a temporary debuff, penalty, or negative gameplay mechanic that you can inflict on your rival team at a Capture Zone. The type of Grief is shown at the objective tracker within a Capture Zone. Here are the possible Griefs you’re aiming to inflict on your foes: Weapon Nerf: The affected players inflict considerably reduced damage to zombie enemies. Ammo Drain: All ammo-based weapons, including those stowed, receive an ammo drain with bullets or shells being removed constantly while the Grief is active. Zombie Ambush: An Elite zombie is summoned, and it solely focuses its killing power on the enemy team until either the Elite or the team are defeated, or the timer runs out. Weapon Carousel: The rival players’ weapons are randomly swapped every few seconds. Frozen: This Grief reduces the enemy players’ movement, along with frost and ice coating the characters. Griefs and Capture Zones also introduce new score types, including: Capture Zone Kill: Awarded to a player who defeated a zombie type during a successful Capture Zone completion. Capture Zone Win: Awarded to all players on a team who successfully commandeer a Capture Zone. Capture Zone Elite Kill: Awarded to a player who slays an Elite spawned in a Capture Zone. Available Grief Arenas (11 Arenas, Launch) A total of 11 different Grief Arenas are available in this mode. Here’s a list along with a brief description of the points of interest within each one: Liberty Falls Arena 1: Pump & Pay, Motor Lodge, and Fuller’s Liberty Lanes Liberty Falls Arena 2: Dark Aether Church, Cemetery, Hilltop Terminus Arena 1: Bio Lab Terminus Arena 2: Crab Island  Citadelle des Morts Arena: Courtyard, Ramparts, and Entrance Hall The Tomb Arena 1: Dig Site, Mausoleum The Tomb Arena 2: Dark Aether Nexus Shattered Veil Arena 1: Garden Pond, Lower Terrace Shattered Veil Arena 2: Upper Terrace, Shem’s Henge, Motor Court Shattered Veil Arena 3: Mansion Foyer, Overlook, East Foyer, Library Shattered Veil Arena 4: West Hallways, Southwest Balcony, Bottlery Access the following new content within all five Zombies Maps (unless otherwise stated) throughout Season 04: Dark Ops Challenges (Launch) A mysterious new set of hidden Calling Cards and bounteous amounts of XP are available at the start of Season 04, thanks to a fresh drop of Zombies Dark Ops Challenges. Who knows... maybe there’s even one for Grief. All further information is [[REDACTED]]. New LTM: Starting Room (Mid-Season) Inspired by the starting room in the classic “Moon” Zombies map, drop in with up to three of your Zombies crew into a more straightforward but challenging experience where you’re locked into the first zone of a map. Raptor One is gone, and those undead hordes are only getting stronger, but all doors in the initial zone are locked. Survive to the highest round you can! New LTM: Abomination Challenge (Mid-Season) Enter a warped version of Liberty Falls during this new Mid-Season Event, and hunt down an ultra-powered-up Abomination. Perhaps it’s wise to bring backup. Wreck even the most battle-hardened undead threat with the explosive power of the Shatter Blast Ammo Mod, then drop even more devastating firepower on the hordes with the Grim Reaper Support launcher. There’s three new chewables, too! Ammo Mod: Shatter Blast (Launch) Available: Augments Menu, and In-Game (Pause Menu) “Bullets deal explosive damage. Each bullet has a chance to create an explosion that destroys armor.” Modify your ammunition to explode the toughened armor of certain normal and Special undead enemies. This mod also has a second benefit, creating an area-of-effect blast radius at the same time, whether any armor is shattered or not.  Due to the somewhat chaotic nature of this modification, there is a random chance of the Shatter Blast effect triggering, and it won’t happen every time you fire. Also expect a cooldown period after the effect. Note that Shatter Blast doesn’t directly affect Elite enemies (pending some Augment research!), but area-of-effect explosions can still damage them. You are wise to wrangle your undead into hordes so they’re near each other, to really inflict some damage! Shatter Blast: Major Augments Research the following Augments to further customize this Ammo Mod. Big Game Shatter Blast can be used against Elite enemies. Expect an impressively sized explosion. Blast Chain On explosion, three additional explosions occur in rapid succession. Blast Repair For every enemy that has its armor destroyed by Shatter Blast, armor health will be restored for the player. Shatter Blast: Minor Augments Blast Zone Increase the size of the explosion. Blast Boost Increase the explosion damage. Blast Wave Normal enemies are knocked down by the explosion. New GobbleGums (Launch) Crack your teeth on three new GobbleGums, available across all maps once you earn or unlock them and equip them in your GobbleGum Loadout Pack. Explosive Flourish (Epic): Reloading your weapon creates an explosion around you. GobbleGum lasts 2 minutes. Flavor Hex (Legendary): Activates a random Ultra GobbleGum. Rainburps (Whimsical): Zombies killed belch sparkly rainbow bubbles. Lasts 3 minutes. Additional Support Weapon: Grim Reaper (In-Season) Available: Rivals Event reward Salvage: 2000 Hammer away at the Crafting Table and assemble a powerful semi-automatic launcher known as the Grim Reaper, which deals out lethal damage to the undead with up to a quartet of missiles fired in one load. With a capacity to carry up to a dozen rockets, and the ability to fire them individually or as a quartet of devastation, this can level a courtyard of undead with a single launch! Unlock this Support weapon once you’ve earned it via the Rivals Event. Note: Zombies Events: Check the General section later in this blog to uncover a first look at events for this mode across Season 04, including the King of the Dead Leaderboard challenge! Call of Duty: Warzone Content Summary New Point of Interest: The towering skyscraper known as The Overlook comes to Downtown Verdansk, with ziplines, cranes, and an impressive interior to explore. New and Limited Time Modes: Clash mode – the massive 52v52 Verdansk Deathmatch – is back! Join 51 other Operators in a chaotic firefight to claim domination points and defeat foes. Then compete in a specially themed area of Verdansk in a match with rule-bending modifiers in Havoc Royale. And drop into Rebirth Island for a spot of Resurgence Casual human and bot combat. Doubling Down on Ranked Play: Call of Duty: Warzone doubles down – literally – with two separate Ranked Play modes; Battle Royale: Ranked (Verdansk) at launch running throughout the entire season, and the return of Ranked Play to Rebirth Island at Mid-season. New Features: Cranes and horizontal ziplines Downtown. Lobby Lockdown in The Overlook. Look up and look out!  Dominate foes with a gigantic new skyscraper point of interest, available to Operators within the vicinity of Downtown! The old tenement blocks, Burger Town, and SKN Comm tower have been demolished, and construction crews are finalizing a sprawling skyscraper that dominates the landscape! Look for a full recon tour below. Recon Tour: The Overlook As construction nears completion on this behemoth of a skyscraper (more than twice the height of any previous building within the Verdansk conurbation), it’s worth gaining a tactical advantage on this monolithic new point of interest. The Overlook Footprint: The “Diamond” and Perimeter Security Checkpoints Drop into the grounds of The Overlook, and you’ll immediately see the grounds of the new skyscraper under construction stretch in a rough diamond shape around the location of the old SKN Comm Tower. Flanked by two massive cranes, the building plot perimeter runs from the corner of the main bank, clockwise past the Post Office, passing the Rothwynn Donna building, northeast to the Museum/Art Gallery, and follows the road around to City Hall.  All the older structures (the Burger Town, low-rise tenement blocks, the building site, and the small coffee shop and bar across from the Museum) have been bulldozed in the name of progress! Perimeter Security Checkpoints Military-style security checkpoints have been set up on the corners and roads of the plot of land within the footprint of the structure. Most aren’t secure enough to impede vehicular progress, and some have ramps to allow airborne access. These serve as helpful visual cues that you’re entering the new POI, The Overlook.  Ground Level: Construction Sites Most of the groundwork around the skyscraper is in its final stages of completion, but there are plenty of barriers, fencing, canopies, and containers to use as cover in the area below each of the two giant cranes north and south of the structure. Ground Level: Restaurants Burger Town: Fans of the famous Burger Town Double Cheeseburger will be thrilled to know the fast-food chain has relocated a few meters further down the road from its previous location and is contained within the massive footprint of The Overlook. This outlet also serves as a lower entrance into the grand foyer interior of the building. Sushi Bar: Diagonally opposite the Burger Town, on the northwest side of the POI, is a small Sushi bar, within the footprint of the tower itself. Nestled in the stepped courtyard, you can quickly advance to the north crane or main lobby entrance. It’s also worth pointing out that the sight lines around this POI have significantly changed since Season 03, with much greater visibility across familiar POIs within Downtown and the surrounding districts. North and South Cranes Two huge cranes flank the north and south side of the monolith and are another way to traverse into The Overlook at great height. With five separate platforms attached to the mast to land on (two at ground, and three at height), use the vertical Ascender built into the crane’s mast and take an eight-second ascent to a platform just below the jib that extends out to the main winch, and the hoist allowing a jump to The Overlook roof. Operators who aren’t challenged by vertigo will have wild and panoramic views that extend to all of Verdansk’s POIs (except Quarry)! Both cranes are also functional, and providing you’ve found the necessary controls in the vicinity (both on and off the cranes’ superstructures), cargo on the hook block and hoist can be summoned and moved to various locations around the tower and nearby Downtown buildings, in case you or your team needs a daring lift! Zip Lines and Additional Rooftop Cover Increasing the ways you can quickly traverse and gain (or lose) great height in your tactical positioning near The Overlook exterior, zip-lines provide a diagonal route to and from the surrounding Downtown building rooftops.  Each also has a small billboard or other protective cover as you reach the zipline mechanism. Access to and from Overlook at the following locations: South: Post Office rooftop to Skydeck. West: Rothwynn Donna building rooftop to Skydeck. Northeast: Art Gallery/Museum rooftop to Skydeck. East: City Hall dome rooftop to Skydeck.  The Overlook: Entrance and Lobby Lockdown The Overlook has a substantial exterior and interior presence, mainly tiered fountains, planting, and stairs up to forecourts and shuttered entrances to the north, east, south, and west, all leading to a central interior lobby. If you find the main entrances shuttered, it means the lobby is experiencing a lockdown. Perhaps there’s a way to breach this security? Are there other ways to get in? The interior lobby has a coffee shop, mezzanine office, stairs, a variety of cover options, and other areas to investigate, not least the marginally terrifying 18-storey elevator ascenders to the northeast and southwest, and even those only get you halfway up the inside of the tower. The Overlook: Atrium and Skydeck (Interior, Exterior) Just above the midway point within The Overlook tower is a five-floor interior with exterior Skydeck. Depending on your use of ziplines, you’re able to access a large Atrium with concrete tile and planters and an abundance of plant life. Around the perimeter are rooms, stairwells, and two new elevator shafts, all enabling you to reach the exterior Skydeck. Known by some locals as the “cyclops” tower, due to this large central upper opening you can fly a helicopter through, the Skydeck features a small glass pyramid, some windswept seating, and infiltration to the floors above.  The large, rectangular holes on all four sides provide zipline access around Downtown, as well as daring helicopter maneuvers through the gaps. The ascent doesn’t end here; enter any of the four pillars holding up the roof of the skyscraper for another elevator ascender ride. The Overlook: Penthouse (Interior), Roof (Exterior) The remaining upper floors of The Overlook are nearing completion, meaning health and safety rules aren’t being observed as stringently as you’d like. Top floors up from the Skydeck is the roof. Missing windows, exterior gantries without railings, and exposed exterior ladders mean you’ll be thankful for your parachute.  Depending on which of the tower corners you’re fighting through, this offers another five floors to investigate, including rooms that are fully furnished.  These include a security and server room, a two-floor penthouse level with opulent bedroom, kitchen, and games area, and that’s before the more perturbed of Operators learn the secrets of the [[REDACTED]] room!  As well as the usual Battle Royale and Resurgence playlists across Verdansk and Rebirth Island, major modes – Clash and Battle Royale: Ranked Play – return to the game, with the intriguing Havoc Royale and the arrival of Resurgence: Ranked Play on Rebirth Island at mid-season! Clash LTM (Launch) 104 players (52v52), 15-minute matches 52v52 Team Deathmatch chaos is back in Call of Duty: Warzone! First introduced into Call of Duty: Warzone during Season Five of Black Ops Cold War back in September 2021 as a revamped version of the original “Rumble” mode, Clash is back, bigger than ever, and now includes some impressive, game-changing equipment and power-ups only available in this mode. But what is Clash Mode? This is Team Deathmatch and Domination on a massive scale! Overview, Win Conditions, and Scoring This action-packed team-based mode takes place in and around a specific POI within Verdansk, and pits two teams of 52 players (divided into 13 Quad Squads per side) against each other. With no Circle Collapse, no last stand benefit for the Survivor Perk, and your Loadouts available immediately, the plan is simple; your side needs to acquire 500 points by the end of the 15-minute time limit. These are mainly gained by slaying enemies (sometimes aided with power ups you can acquire within a match), completing contracts, and participating in the in-game Public Events, as well as the following: Scoring: 1 point per enemy elimination 2 points per enemy elimination with Double Down Power Up 5 points per Contract completed 10 points for capturing a Domination Point (Flag) 10 points for capturing a Bonus Crate or a Cash Crate Clash: Available Locations Expect Clash matches to occur across a sub-section of the main Verdansk map, incorporating several adjacent areas around the following POIs: Quarry Boneyard Farmland Promenade (East) Clash: Available Vehicles With the impetus to reach the enemy forces never more important, expect heavy use of vehicles throughout a Clash Match. The full complement of currently available ground and air vehicles are as follows: Heli Cargo Truck LTV (Light Tactical Vehicle) Polaris RZR Pro R 4 Available Contracts There are three available Contracts to complete in Clash Mode: Scavenger Search and Destroy Recon The Scavenger and Recon Contracts work in the same way as they do in Battle Royale Matches. In addition to the usual rewards and in-game cash, you receive five team points for each Contract completed. Search and Destroy Contracts (Clash Mode Only): Everything must go with this new contract, where one team plants a bomb on a Buy Station, and on detonation, they can earn impressive rarity weapons and items from the Buy Stations’ inventory. The other teams can defuse the bomb to earn a Fire Sale for a major discount from the Buy Stations.  Expect the Search and Destroy Contract to be available in Battle Royale, Resurgence, and Plunder Modes, at Mid-Season. In-Match Events and Domination Points During a Clash match, expect several in-match Events to occur. These are like those in Battle Royale Matches, though Clash Events are timed throughout the match rather than related to the Circle Collapse. The available Events are: Domination Points Bonus Points Crates Clash Firesale Cash Crates Power Surge Domination Points Event: Up to three single capture Dom Points (flags) appear on the map, and these respawn throughout the match. Much like the Multiplayer Mode of the same name, a team that reaches and captures one of the Dom Points receives a reward; in this case, 10 team points. Bonus Points Crates Event: A cargo plane flies across the center of the map, and up to four crates are dropped. Teams are likely to head to the crates as they float to the ground, as capturing a crate awards you with 10 team points. Clash Firesale Event: For the next two minutes, all players can take advantage of a Firesale as two Portable Buy Stations are dropped into the backfield of each team (a total of four). Additionally, all loot crates are restocked and cash found in crates is also increased.  Cash Crates: Capture one (or more) of the three Cash Crates that drop during this event also nets you 10 team points. Power Surge Event: For the next two minutes, there’s an increased drop rate of Power Ups when you dispatch an enemy player or loot any ground caches. Clash Mode Gameplay Features As well as the previously mentioned new Search and Destroy Contract, Clash comes loaded with features unique to the mode. Here’s the full run-down of what to expect: Buy Stations (Clash Mode only): Expect Buy Stations to be scattered across a Clash map and roughly split between each team’s area of operations. Portable Buy Stations are also available during the Firesale In-Match Event. Here’s what you can purchase: Armor Plate: $500 Munitions Box: $1,000 Trophy System: $1,500 Counter UAV: $3,000 Sentry Turret: $3,000 Hand Cannon: $4,000 Bunker Buster: $4,000 Cluster Strike: $4,000 Precision Airstrike: $6,000 Specialist Perk: $10,000 New Field Upgrade: Door Barricade (Clash Mode at Season Launch): Control access points more easily during mid or close-quarter combat scenarios and delay enemy incursions with the Door Barricade. Fit a barricade to a close single or double door, and a heavy-duty lock attaches to (and is visible on) both sides, preventing the opening or access through the door. This is until the barricade is either removed (only by the Operator or squadmates who fitted it), or destroyed, usually by using explosives, though gunfire and melee equipment is also an option. Expect the Door Barricade to be loot in Battle Royale and Battle Royale Casual Modes, via the new Care Package Killstreak, all coming at Mid-Season. New Killstreak: Hand Cannon (Clash Mode at Season Launch): This high-powered pistol Killstreak, originally available in Multiplayer during Season 01, is available in ground cache as rare loot. Expect a slow rate of fire and finite ammunition, but good handling, and improved hip fire accuracy with faster hip-fire shooting speed. Expect the Hand Cannon to be rare loot in Battle Royale, Battle Royale Casual, Resurgence, and Plunder Modes, via the new Care Package Killstreak, all coming at Mid-Season. Feature: SAM Turrets (Clash Mode only): Chopper and drone pilots take note; Clash mode maps feature SAM Turrets in various tactical positions across the environment. Spend $1,500 of in-match cash to activate these anti-air missile batteries and use them up to four times to target any aircraft and drones in the area. If you’re flying in the Heli on the receiving end of a SAM barrage, now’s the time to utilize flares to counter the incoming missiles! Train (Clash Mode only): If a Clash map features a portion of the large, circular railroad track that the train travels along, then this hulking engine and loot-filled carriages are parked and available to use as added cover and looting opportunities. UAV Towers (Clash Mode only): Providing you have the $2,000 in-match cash to activate them, teams can head to and capture a few scattered UAV Towers, allowing pinging of enemy movement across the local area. Clash Mode Powerups  Clash Mode features five differently hued in-match Powerups that are automatically used when found. Available as a possible loot drop or sometimes appearing as dropped loot near the body of an eliminated enemy Operator, these Powerups are color-coded and offer temporary benefits to the Operator who grabs them. All five can be obtained in a single match and expect the frequency of available Powerups to be significantly increased if the in-match Power Surge Event activates (usually in the final stages of a match). Here’s what each of the five Clash Powerups grant you: Hunter (Red Aura): Highlights enemies and allies in red and blue respectively. Allies are visible through walls. Applies Tracker and High Alert Perks. Speed Boost (Yellow Aura): Prevents fall damage and provides approximately 20 percent speed boost to your movement. Regeneration Aura (Green Aura): Refills your health and armor at roughly 20 percent per second. Allies within a small radius around you also receive this benefit. The effect does not stack. Double Down (Blue Aura): Grants you two points per enemy Operator elimination instead of one. Kill Mag (Purple Aura): Refills your active weapon magazine after a kill and quickens your reload. Havoc Royale LTM (Mid-Season) 44 players (Quads), 15-minute matches Compete in a Call of Duty: Warzone match like no other, where rule bending modifiers twist the realities of the usual Resurgence gameplay in chaotic and game-changing ways.  Drop into a specially themed area of Verdansk with your Loadout. Every new gas circle activates a different modifier. Adapt fast to sudden changes as Havoc modifiers may impact you, the environment, and even the gameplay rules. Survive the Havoc, be the last team standing, and claim victory! Expect a full rundown of this game mode in the Season 04 Reloaded blog, just prior to Mid-season. Resurgence Casual (Mid-Season) 44 Players, Players & Bots Infil into Rebirth Island with your squad and commit to winning using the regular Resurgence ruleset, but with one important twist; some of your adversaries aren’t human! Whether facing down a bot or not, Resurgence Casual is a great mode to drop into whether you’re warming up, teaching a new player about the game, or you’re wanting a Resurgence match that isn’t quite as extreme as normal. As with Battle Royale Casual or Call of Duty: Warzone Bootcamp, game progression is limited in this mode and results will not count towards or against your stats. This mode also doesn’t count towards your eligibility to accessing Resurgence Ranked Play when it arrives at Mid-Season. Grind your way towards a coveted position in the Top 250 as Battle Royale: Ranked Play becomes the first of two Ranked Play variants to drop in Season 04 within Call of Duty: Warzone. Harness the competitive spirit and earn new rewards for ranking up and advancing through the Skill Divisions, unlocking the following rewards as you go: Season 04 BR Ranked Play Rewards First Season Win: Weapon Charm Get 25 Eliminations: Elimination Sticker Get 100 Eliminations: Elimination Weapon Camo Get 250 Eliminations: Elimination LR 7.62 Weapon Blueprint Silver: “Ranked Season 4 – Silver” Emblem Gold: “Ranked Season 4 – Gold” Emblem and Decal Platinum: “Ranked Season 4 – Platinum” Emblem and Decal Diamond: “Ranked Season 4 – Diamond” Emblem and Decal Crimson: “Ranked Season 4 – Crimson” Emblem and Decal Iridescent: “Ranked Season 4 – Iridescent” Emblem and Decal Top 250: “Ranked Season 4 – Top 250” Emblem and Decal Season 04 Champion: “Ranked Season 4 – Top 250 Champion” Emblem Ranked Play: Resurgence (Mid-Season) Trios, Rebirth Island Craving some real competition on Rebirth Island? Then squad up with your winning Trio, and attempt dominance over the very best players as Resurgence Ranked Play makes its triumphant return! Expect the same rules set you remember during the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare® III era, and an expanded look at this returning, fan-favorite mode in the Season 04 Reloaded blog, just prior to Mid-season. Ranked Play Notes: Battle Royale: Ranked Play (Verdansk) runs from Launch Window throughout the entirety of Season 04. Resurgence: Ranked Play (Rebirth Island) begins at Mid-Season, and runs alongside Battle Royale: Ranked Play, meaning you can play one or both Modes when they are active. The ranking is separate from Battle Royale: Ranked Play. A new Contract, Field Upgrade, Killstreak, Perk, and ATV are all set to drop into Verdansk during Season 04: Clash Mode Features Expansion (Mid-Season) After an evaluation period in Call of Duty: Warzone’s Clash Mode, expect the following new equipment to become available across additional modes at mid-season. Here’s what to expect: Contract: Search & Destroy: Battle Royale, Resurgence, Plunder. Field Upgrade: Door Barricade: Battle Royale, Battle Royale Casual Modes. Available via Care Package. Killstreak: Hand Cannon: Battle Royale, Battle Royale Casual, and Plunder Modes. Available via Care Package. Killstreak: Care Package (Mid-Season) Open ground loot caches for a rare chance to obtain the Care Package, a throwable Killstreak that, when lobbed, explodes into trail of smoke, after which a loadout-sized crate falls from the skies. Open this crate for a chance to obtain rare loot including rare equipment, the Specialist Perk, and more. New Perk: Loot Master (Mid-Season) Available only as Ground Loot during Resurgence and Plunder matches, the Loot Master Perk allows you to maximize your scavenging potential and gear up faster by increasing the amount of loot you find while opening caches. Gain the early advantage or sustain yourself during prolonged engagements. Expect an increased drop rate for equipped weapon ammo, a higher chance to find tacticals and lethals, more cash, and a greater chance at field upgrades, killstreaks, and other high-tier gear. ATV: Polaris Sportsman XP 1000 (Launch) Added to the vehicle pool is the Polaris Sportsman XP 1000, a real wild ride allowing you to hit the Verdansk goat trails in comfort with legendary suspension, great clearance and traction, and versatility for positioning up to three Operators on the surface of the vehicle. Compared to the current ATV, the wheelbase and size of the Sportsman XP 1000 offers more stability than ever before.  Note: Call of Duty: Warzone Events: Check the General section later in this blog to uncover the full complement of events for this mode across Season 04. General Content (MP, ZM, WZ) Call of Duty: General Content Summary (All Modes and Games) Weapons Detail: Five new weapons arrive in Season 04, including two at launch: the LC10 SMG and FFAR 1 Assault Rifle. Later in the season, get your hands on the , Essex Model 07 Marksman Rifle, Olympia Special weapon and Pickaxe Melee weapon, and change up your playstyle with new attachments. The Events Horizon: Season 04 is packed with Events, including Rivals, Ballerina (From the World of John Wick), and even more coming mid-season.. Plus, prove your worth across the Zombies leaderboards and become King of the Dead! Battle Pass and BlackCell: The Season 04 Battle Pass brings Stitch and brutal BlackCell Operator Omen to the forefront alongside new Weapon Blueprints, Operator Skins, Calling Cards, Finishing Moves, Emotes, and more in a mix of free and premium tiers. Free tiers include two new base weapons and the G-Grip Tactical Foregrip. Season 04 Operators: Stitch returns after being freed from prison, headlining the new Battle Pass next to the sinister Omen leading BlackCell. Plus, deploy as assassin Eve Macarro in a collaboration with Ballerina, followed by much more at the mid-season. CDL Announcements: Major IV is almost here! Find out where to watch, plus the in-game rewards you can unlock, just for tuning in! Primary Weapon: LC10 (Launch) SMG, Battle Pass Page 3, Page 14 Battle Pass Blueprint Levels: 38 MAGS: 4 MAG SIZE: 34 Mastery Badges: Yes Attachments: Optic, Muzzle, Barrel, Underbarrel, Magazine, Rear Grip, Stock, Laser, Fire Mods Customize Options: Skins, Camos and Reticle Unlocks (MP, ZM, WZ), Accessories (1), Decals (1), Stickers (3). Full-auto submachine gun. Excellent accuracy and range, with a moderate rate of fire. Average mobility and very slow handling for its class. Returning after its debut in Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War, the LC10 SMG spits out rounds fast coupled with good accuracy and range, moderate damage, and a quick reload to get you back into the fight. The weapon performs well off the hip or down sights, with 34 rounds in the base magazine for a hefty ammo supply. Via Gunsmith, equip a variety of improvements such as a Laser for improved hipfire spread and an updated Barrel to further extend the weapon’s respectable damage range. Primary Weapon: FFAR 1 (Launch) Assault Rifle, Battle Pass Page 6, Page 11 HVT Tier Battle Pass Blueprint Levels: 42 MAGS: 3 MAG SIZE: 30 Mastery Badges: Yes Attachments: Optic, Muzzle, Barrel, Underbarrel, Magazine, Rear Grip, Stock, Laser, Fire Mods Customize Options: Skins, Camo and Reticle Unlocks (MP, ZM, WZ), Accessories (1), Decals (1), Stickers (3).  Full-auto assault rifle. Very high rate of fire and excellent CQB power, but slower handling and mobility. Boasting a blazing fast fire rate that rivals the SMG weapon class, this bullpup Assault Rifle is designed for taking down targets fast. The somewhat unpredictable recoil favors burst fire when tackling distant targets, but once you’re locked on it’s all over for them. Supporting a variety of Underbarrel Launcher attachments, use Gunsmith to add greater versatility to the weapon. Running low on ammo? Grab an Extended Mag while you’re at it. Primary Weapon: Essex Model 07 (In-Season) Marksman Rifle, Event Reward Levels: 38 MAGS: 3 MAG SIZE: 8 Mastery Badges: Yes Attachments: Optic, Muzzle, Barrel, Underbarrel, Magazine, Lever, Stock, Laser, Fire Mods Customize Options: Skins, Camo and Reticle Unlocks (MP, ZM, WZ), Accessories (1), Decals (1), Stickers (3). Lever-action marksman rifle. High damage potential. Balanced by slower rate of fire and handling. Inflict heavy critical point damage with this lever-action tactical rifle. An ideal tool for the new sheriff in town, this classic armament offers smooth handling with shots that quickly recenter after kicking up. Choose from a variety of Levers to further customize the weapon’s action, improving ADS speed, sprint to fire speed, and other movement abilities.  Special Weapon: Olympia (Mid-Season) Special, Event Reward Levels: 30 MAGS: 8 MAG SIZE: 2 Mastery Badges: Yes Attachments: Barrel, Stock Customize Options: Skins, Camos (MP, ZM, WZ), Accessories (1), Decals (1), Stickers (3). Double-barrel shotgun. Very high damage and respectable range but requires frequent reloading. The double-barrel Olympia – not seen since Black Ops 3 – makes its debut in Black Ops 6, returning as a Special Weapon that makes for the perfect backup when entering tight spaces. The Olympia holds two shots at a time, each spraying multiple pellets when your Operator pulls the trigger. Light customization via the Short Barrel and Cut-Off Stock attachments gives you some control over the weapon’s playstyle, but the fundamentals remain the same: get up close and make your shots count. Fire down the sight for a tighter pellet spread or shoot off the hip to inflict damage over a wider area. Melee Weapon: Pickaxe (Mid-Season) Melee, Event Reward Levels: 30 Mastery Badges: Yes Attachments: None Customize Options: Skins. One-hit kill. Medium attack speed. Short range. Without a Pickaxe, you’ll be lost in the tundra. Bring the right tool for the job when deploying to Iceland in Season 04’s Multiplayer maps, starting with this deadly Melee weapon that downs unarmored enemies with brutal severity. Though its range is short, the Pickaxe’s combination of rapid slashes and overhead swipes will keep enemies frozen in their tracks. Close the distance and say farewell. G-Grip (Launch) SMGs (except PP-19), Assault Rifles, Battle Pass Page 7 Reward Vertical foregrip with integrated laser for improved firing stability, horizontal recoil control, and tightened spread when transitioning between hipfire and aiming down sights. Beam: Blue. Blocks Laser attachments. Stryder .22 3-Round Burst Mod (Launch) Stryder .22 Pistol, Event Reward Convert the Stryder .22 into a 3-round burst. Drastically improves fire rate and maintains manageable gun kick but alters the weapon’s damage profile outside of the effective range. SVD Full Auto Mod (In-Season) SVD Sniper Rifle, Event Reward Convert the SVD from semi-auto to full-auto functionality, ramping up the speed of your damage output and drastically improving recoil and handling. TR2 CQB Auto Conversion (In-Season) TR2 Marksman Rifle, Event Reward Alter the TR2 Marksman Rifle to fire handgun caliber rounds, resulting in a Marksman Rifle with a compact frame and fully automatic capabilities that rival fire rates of an SMG! Stitch Returns to Action in the Season 04 Battle Pass Stitch returns to the fray, leading this season’s Battle Pass content in a shocking team up with Adler. Purchase the Season 04 Battle Pass for 1,100 COD Points or the Season 04 Battle Pass Bundle for 2,400 COD Points to immediately unlock the Instant Rewards Page of the Battle Pass, including the following items: 10% Battle Pass XP Boost The new “Supermax” Stitch Operator and “Supermax BlackCell” Stitch Operator Skin for those who purchase BlackCell The “Lock Up” Legendary Blueprint for the Feng 82 LMG The “Try Me!” Emote The “Untamable” Large Decal Start to unlock up to 1,100 COD Points as you progress through the Battle Pass The Season 04 Battle Pass includes over 110 pieces of unlockable content (excluding BlackCell) including two new Base Weapons, the G-Grip Tactical Foregrip Attachment, and several unlockable mil-sim style skins for Bailey, Payne, Grey, Caine, Brutus, Toro, Adler, Nazir, and Marshall. Stay tuned for the BlackCell, Battle Pass and Store Bundles blog prior to Season 04 launch for more details. BlackCell Offerings When the job needs to get done, summon Omen, the otherworldly Operator leading BlackCell content in Season 04. The menacing Operator and his three-headed guard dog are joined by a cast of infected, black and purple-hued Operator Skins and Weapon Blueprints earned exclusively through BlackCell. BlackCell owners can access the Season 04 Battle Pass via the exclusive BlackCell Page, instantly unlocking the following items: The “Omen” BlackCell Operator and Skin 10% XP Boost 1,100 COD Points The “Guard Dog” Companion Finishing Move The “Hellblock” Mastercraft Blueprint for the Ladra SMG The “Kill Tally” Gun Screen The “BlackCell” Clan Tag (showcased in Lobbies and Winner’s Circles) BlackCell owners get access to page after page of additional exclusive rewards within the Season 04 Battle Pass, including: Seven BlackCell-exclusive skins for Stitch (two skins), Bailey, Payne, Caine, Brutus, and Adler.  Seven BlackCell-exclusive Weapon Blueprints for the Krig C (Assault Rifle), XMG (LMG), SWAT 5.56 (Marksman Rifle), ASG-98 (Shotgun), FFAR 1 (Assault Rifle), Model L (Assault Rifle), LC10 (SMG) Over 130 item rewards (Battle Pass and BlackCell related) for those who fully complete the Season 04 BlackCell Battle Pass. As usual, players who upgrade to BlackCell after purchasing the Battle Pass will also receive back the COD Points they spent. BlackCell Daily Challenges: Players with BlackCell will receive additional Daily Challenges throughout Season 04 for Multiplayer, Zombies, and Call of Duty: Warzone, giving even more chances to rake in the XP during your play sessions! BlackCell Loyalty Bonus: Players who purchased BlackCell in a previous Black Ops 6season and go on to purchase Season 04 BlackCell will earn a permanent 10% Player and Weapon XP Loyalty Bonus, up to 30% for players who purchased Season 01, Season 02, and Season 03 BlackCell! The return of Stitch signals a shift in the battles ahead, requiring new Operators to meet the demands of the intensifying conflict. Predict a swift demise for your opponents with Omen leading BlackCell, joined by Stitch at the head of the Battle Pass plus a special appearance by Eve Macarro from Ballerina. Omen (BlackCell, Crimson One, Launch) “Omen” Operator: BlackCell Instant Reward Page It’s time for lockdown. Omen is a presence who strikes fear even in the world’s most dangerous criminals, with an almost preternatural ability to keep even the most sinister prisoners in line. Stitch (Battle Pass, Rogue Black Ops, Launch) “Supermax” and “Yard Dog” Skins: Battle Pass Instant Reward Page, Battle Pass Completion Page Until recently, Stitch was assumed dead. Instead of eliminating his enemy, however, Adler sent him off to a black site prison. Now the time has come, and following a daring jailbreak, Stitch is once again free. Adler needs his help cracking the codenames that will finally lead to the Pantheon moles, but at what cost? Ballerina (Bundle, Crimson One, In-Season) Store Bundle Seeking revenge for her slain father, Eve Macarro embarks on a relentless mission against the High Table’s most feared opponents in Ballerina, the highly anticipated new action film from the World of John Wick. Deploy as the elite assassin in one of two looks in the Ballerina Bundle arriving in Season 04. Participate in a new round of scheduled Events across Multiplayer, Zombies, and Call of Duty: Warzone. Earn rewards like new weapons, special attachments, and more. Here’s a first look at the Events to come (with more announcements in the Season 04 Reloaded blog): Event: Ballerina (MP, ZM, WZ, In-Season) Activation Dates: June 5 to June 12 Total Rewards: 10 (+ One BlackCell reward) Enter the world of John Wick with the new Ballerina Event. Prove your capabilities as a supreme assassin by slaying your way across Multiplayer, Zombies, and Call of Duty: Warzone. Rewards include the new Essex Model 07 Marksman Rifle and a Ballerina-themed Nunchuck Melee Blueprint for BlackCell Owners. Event: Rivals (MP, ZM, WZ, In-Season) Activation Dates: June 12 to June 26 Total Rewards: 15 (+ One BlackCell reward) Enemies become allies in the Rivals Event, when Stitch brings his code-cracking expertise to help uncover the real names of the final Pantheon moles in the CIA. The goal is simple; prove you’re the most proficient Operator by earning XP across all game modes and unlock a plethora of impressive free items. Dominate your enemies to become the first to unlock rewards including the Stryder .22 3-Round Burst Mod (Attachment) and Grim Reaper (Scorestreak). Events: King of the Dead, Master of Grief (Zombies, Mid-Season) Activation Dates (King of the Dead): June 26 to July 3 Activation Dates (Master of Grief): July 10 to July 17 King of the Dead: “Eliminate zombies in any Zombie mode to earn points to climb the leaderboard.” Master of Grief: “Collect Essence in Grief to earn points to climb the leaderboard.” Earn points by slaying all types of undead! As you’d expect, you receive more points for dispatching the harder zombie types. This, in turn, causes you to climb the Zombies leaderboard, and once the Event is over, rewards will be granted based on your leaderboard position. Everyone receives some kind of reward, but to obtain the really good stuff, it’s time to perfect your Special and Elite Zombies slaying!  Season 04 brings new Bundles to the Store, including a special crossover event with Ballerina. Get more intel in the Season 04 BlackCell, Battle Pass, and Bundles blog arriving before launch. Tracer Pack: Ballerina Choose one of two Operator Skins for Eve, a red sequin dress as “Eve Macarro” or a sleek black professional fit as the “Ruska Rogue.” Bring light to the darkness with three Legendary Weapon Blueprints featuring High Table Coin Tracers and High Table Coin Death FX: the “Relevé” AK-74 Assault Rifle, “Plié” Saug SMG, and the “Arabesque” 9MM PM Pistol. For a snazzier elimination, take them out with the “Dance With Death” Finishing Move. Balance lethality and elegance with additional Ballerina themed content, including the “Pirouette” Emote, “Keepsake” Weapon Charm, animated “Caged Grace” Emblem, animated “Pas de Duex Calling Card, and the “Take a Bow” Loading Screen. Tracer Pack: Ink and Smoke Reactive Ultra Skin Add some class to your deployments with the cel-shaded, black and greyscale “Hardboiled” Ultra Operator Skin for Weaver, accompanied by the Reactive “Lethal Inspection” AMES 85 Assault Rifle and “Personal Detective” ASG-89 Shotgun Weapon Blueprints, both featuring Noir Tracers and Ink Annihilation Death FX. For a closer finish, leap for their throats using the “Wire Cut” Finishing Move. When taking on the undead, equip the “Search Engine” Wonder Weapon skin for the Thrustodyne M23 and show off your Zombies credentials with the “Sidepiece” Weapon Charm, “Dead Noir” Weapon Sticker, “Evidence” Spray, “Greyscale” Loading Screen, and the consumable Time Out GobbleGum. Other Incoming Bundles There’s plenty more awesome new content arriving in the Season 04 Store, including the “Tracer Pack: Olympus Bolt Mastercraft Ultra Skin” Bundle, featuring an electrifying Mastercraft Weapon Blueprint for the new LC10 SMG alongside a divine Ultra Operator Skin for Caine. Also incoming is the “Tracer Pack: System Breach” Bundle, and the “Tracer Pack: The Goat Ultra Skin” Bundle with a Goat Companion Finishing Move. See more of the season’s upcoming Bundles and more in the Season 04 BlackCell, Battle Pass, and Store Bundle blog. Call of Duty League, the pinnacle of competitive Call of Duty, is bringing its fourth and final Major of the season to the DreamHack Dallas show floor. Guests with a CDL add-on ticket can watch Major IV live, where the 12 Call of Duty League teams will battle it out for the final CDL points to qualify for 2025 Call of Duty League Championship in June. Ensure you get into the action by tuning in and watching Major IV live on YouTube. Be sure to link your YouTube account with your Activision ID Account to earn some special viewership rewards (shown above). Click here for more intel. The event starts at 10:300 AM PT Friday, May 23, and continuing at 10:30 AM PT Saturday May 24 with the Finals beginning at 10:30 AM PT Sunday May 25.  Black Ops 6 is available now, and now’s definitely the time to experience the spy action thriller Campaign, the in-depth tactical chaos of best-in-class Multiplayer, and to soak in the gory glory of an incredible round-based Zombies experience with five maps and the brand-new Grief mode! Click here to Purchase Black Ops 6. © 2025 Activision Publishing, Inc. ACTIVISION, CALL OF DUTY, CALL OF DUTY WARZONE, MODERN WARFARE, CALL OF DUTY LEAGUE, and CALL OF DUTY BLACK OPS are trademarks of Activision Publishing, Inc. All other trademarks and trade names are the property of their respective owners. For more information, please visit www.callofduty.com and www.youtube.com/callofduty, and follow @Activision and @CallofDuty on X, Instagram, and Facebook. For Call of Duty Updates, follow @CODUpdates on X. ®, TM & © 2025 Lions Gate Entertainment Inc. and related companies. All Rights Reserved.
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  • Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 and Warzone Season 4 — full details, live May 29

    Russell Adler didn’t eliminate Vikhor “Stitch” Kuzmin after all, instead confining the villain to an Icelandic black site prison as insurance for a rainy day. That day has come as Adler and crew free their former foe, their only chance to finally crack the Pantheon codenames.

    Witness the return of Stitch in the massive Season 04 update for Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 and Call of Duty: Warzone, bringing new maps, modes, weapons, and more. Season 04 launches May 29 on PS5 and PS4.

    Play Video

    Multiplayer overview

    New Core 6v6 Maps

    Shutdown: Shut off the power to the prison with an attack on a hydroelectric dam in Iceland. Fight over the rugged terrain, dive into the lake, and battle around the damaged turbine.

    Fugitive: With the power cut, it’s time to break Stitch out of the black site prison. Infiltrate the frozen compound, climbing, ziplining, and battling over the grounds and in the cell block where alarms warn of the jailbreak.

    New 2v2/6v6 Strike Maps

    Blitz: Traffic comes to a halt as Pantheon agents race towards the prison but get ambushed by the Rogue team. Duck under the bridge for quick cover or trek the cliffside seeking enemy targets.

    Eclipse: Stitch arrives in Avalon, slipping into an underground nightclub to discuss business. Battle in the neon lights down the halls and over the dance stage.

    Remaster, Core 6v6 Map

    Fringe: Revisit Fringe, originally featured in Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 and coming to Black Ops 6 reimagined as the grand opening of the Rolling Hills distillery.

    New Multiplayer Modes

    Team Elimination: This twist on Kill Confirmed gives both teams a limited number of lives each round. Eliminated players drop a dog tag on death that can be picked up by the enemy to confirm the kill and drain the opposing team’s remaining lives, or by a teammate to prevent the action.

    One in the Chamber: One pistol, one bullet, a knife, and three lives. Eliminate enemies to earn more bullets in this Black Ops classic.

    Party Ops: Get the party started in a new Limited-Time Mode arriving later in the season dropping players into a randomized set of themed minigames.

    Now launching: The Grim Reaper

    Scorestreak: Grim Reaper: The quad-tube loaded Launcher returns from the original Black Ops, inflicting heavy explosive damage on enemy Operators and Scorestreaks alike.

     

    Zombies overview

    Returning Mode: GriefThe fan-favorite competitive Zombies mode returns! This 4v4 indirect PvP mode pits S.A.M. against Director Richtofen as teams pledge their support for one or the other, receiving handler comms guiding them throughout the match. Secure Capture Zones to thwart the enemy with modifiers including reduced damage, drained ammo, slowed movements, and more.  Put your Zombies talents to the test in this mode while competing against real players attempting to survive longer than you and your squad. 

    New Ammo Mod, GobbleGums, Grim Reaper 

    Ammo Mod: Shatter Blast: Modify your ammo to explode on contact, dealing armor-piercing damage in a blast radius. Research Major and Minor Augments to specialize Shatter Blast’s abilities in all-new ways.

    Three New GobbleGums: Chew on Explosive Flourish to trigger an area-of-effect explosion around your Operator when reloading. Pop Flavor Hex to activate a random Ultra GobbleGum, and force eliminated zombies to belch sparkly rainbow bubbles via Rainburps.

    Grim Reaper: Build the new Support weapon at the Crafting Table and blast those zombies to bits!

    New Challenges and LTMs

    Expect an influx of Dark Ops Challenges awarding Calling Cards and bounteous amounts of XP for those able to complete the secret challenges. Play new Limited-Time Modes, including the Starting Room LTM and Abomination Challenge LTM later in the season.

    Call of Duty: Warzone Overview

    New Point of Interest: The Overlook

    Battle up and down The Overlook, a new skyscraper under construction in Downtown. Burger Town and the SKN Comm tower have been demolished to make way for the building. Two cranes flank the dominant POI and checkpoints line the entrances. Work your way from ground level including the relocated Burger Town up to the Penthouse and Roof, or latch onto an ascender and get some serious height.

    New Limited-Time Modes

    Clash: Two teams of 52 drop into a specific POI within Verdansk. With no Circle Collapse and instant access to your Loadouts, be the first team to earn 500 points by eliminating enemies, completing contracts, and participating in Public Events. Earn upgrades like the new Door Barricade Field Upgrade and the Hand Cannon, spend cash to activate SAM Turrets, and earn powerups that alter the course of the match.

    Havoc Royale: Compete in a Resurgence mode where modifiers bend the rules in game-changing ways. Survive the havoc, be the last team standing, and claim victory!

    Resurgence Casual: Drop into a Resurgence match mixing human players and bots. A great mode for warming up, teaching new players about the game, or just chilling out.

    Mid-Season Loadout Items 

    Care Package: Deploy this rare throwable to summon an aerial drop with the chance to obtain rare equipment, the Specialist Perk, and more.

    Perk: Loot Master: Available only in Resurgence and Plunder, gear up faster by increasing the amount of loot you find while opening caches, including an increased drop rate for equipped weapon ammo, Tacticals and Lethals, cash, Field Upgrades, Killstreaks, and other high-tier gear.

    General Overview

    New Weapons: In the Battle Pass, unlock two rapid fire weapons in the LC10 SMG and the FFAR 1 Assault Rifle. Earn more across multiple seasonal events including the lever-action Essex Model 07 Marksman Rifle, Olympia Special weapon, and the Pickaxe Melee weapon.

    New Attachments: Lock in with the G-Grip Tactical Foregrip available on most SMGs and Assault Rifles. Get three weapon conversions, including a burst conversion for the Stryder. 22 Pistol and full-auto conversions for the SVD Sniper Rifle and TR2 Marksman Rifle.

    Events & Ranked Play

    Earn additional rewards across several in-season events, including coveted items like the Essex Model 07 Marksman Rifle, Stryder .22 3-Round Burst Mod, and the Grim Reaper Scorestreak.

    Plus, compete in a new season of Ranked Play for Multiplayer and Call of Duty: Warzone, including Ranked Play: Battle Royale and, in Mid-Season, Ranked Play: Resurgence. Play using a competitive ruleset and earn new seasonal rewards based on the highest Rank obtained in the season.

    Season 04 Battle Pass & Store Content

    Purchase the Battle Pass to immediately unlock rewards including a seasonal 10% Battle Pass XP Boost, the new “Supermax” Stitch Operator Skin, and more, providing access to over 110 pieces of unlockable content. Plus, earn up to 1,100 COD Points as you progress through the Battle Pass Pages. Get even more with BlackCell.

    Look for exciting new Store Bundles including the cel-shaded Tracer Pack: Ink and Smoke plus the Tracer Pack: System Breach, Tracer Pack: Olympus Bolt, and much more.

    Season 04 launches May 29

    Black Ops 6 is available now on PlayStation 5 and PlayStation 4. Experience the spy action thriller Campaign, the in-depth tactical chaos of Multiplayer, and soak in the gory glory of round-based Zombies.
    #call #duty #black #ops #warzone
    Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 and Warzone Season 4 — full details, live May 29
    Russell Adler didn’t eliminate Vikhor “Stitch” Kuzmin after all, instead confining the villain to an Icelandic black site prison as insurance for a rainy day. That day has come as Adler and crew free their former foe, their only chance to finally crack the Pantheon codenames. Witness the return of Stitch in the massive Season 04 update for Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 and Call of Duty: Warzone, bringing new maps, modes, weapons, and more. Season 04 launches May 29 on PS5 and PS4. Play Video Multiplayer overview New Core 6v6 Maps Shutdown: Shut off the power to the prison with an attack on a hydroelectric dam in Iceland. Fight over the rugged terrain, dive into the lake, and battle around the damaged turbine. Fugitive: With the power cut, it’s time to break Stitch out of the black site prison. Infiltrate the frozen compound, climbing, ziplining, and battling over the grounds and in the cell block where alarms warn of the jailbreak. New 2v2/6v6 Strike Maps Blitz: Traffic comes to a halt as Pantheon agents race towards the prison but get ambushed by the Rogue team. Duck under the bridge for quick cover or trek the cliffside seeking enemy targets. Eclipse: Stitch arrives in Avalon, slipping into an underground nightclub to discuss business. Battle in the neon lights down the halls and over the dance stage. Remaster, Core 6v6 Map Fringe: Revisit Fringe, originally featured in Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 and coming to Black Ops 6 reimagined as the grand opening of the Rolling Hills distillery. New Multiplayer Modes Team Elimination: This twist on Kill Confirmed gives both teams a limited number of lives each round. Eliminated players drop a dog tag on death that can be picked up by the enemy to confirm the kill and drain the opposing team’s remaining lives, or by a teammate to prevent the action. One in the Chamber: One pistol, one bullet, a knife, and three lives. Eliminate enemies to earn more bullets in this Black Ops classic. Party Ops: Get the party started in a new Limited-Time Mode arriving later in the season dropping players into a randomized set of themed minigames. Now launching: The Grim Reaper Scorestreak: Grim Reaper: The quad-tube loaded Launcher returns from the original Black Ops, inflicting heavy explosive damage on enemy Operators and Scorestreaks alike.   Zombies overview Returning Mode: GriefThe fan-favorite competitive Zombies mode returns! This 4v4 indirect PvP mode pits S.A.M. against Director Richtofen as teams pledge their support for one or the other, receiving handler comms guiding them throughout the match. Secure Capture Zones to thwart the enemy with modifiers including reduced damage, drained ammo, slowed movements, and more.  Put your Zombies talents to the test in this mode while competing against real players attempting to survive longer than you and your squad.  New Ammo Mod, GobbleGums, Grim Reaper  Ammo Mod: Shatter Blast: Modify your ammo to explode on contact, dealing armor-piercing damage in a blast radius. Research Major and Minor Augments to specialize Shatter Blast’s abilities in all-new ways. Three New GobbleGums: Chew on Explosive Flourish to trigger an area-of-effect explosion around your Operator when reloading. Pop Flavor Hex to activate a random Ultra GobbleGum, and force eliminated zombies to belch sparkly rainbow bubbles via Rainburps. Grim Reaper: Build the new Support weapon at the Crafting Table and blast those zombies to bits! New Challenges and LTMs Expect an influx of Dark Ops Challenges awarding Calling Cards and bounteous amounts of XP for those able to complete the secret challenges. Play new Limited-Time Modes, including the Starting Room LTM and Abomination Challenge LTM later in the season. Call of Duty: Warzone Overview New Point of Interest: The Overlook Battle up and down The Overlook, a new skyscraper under construction in Downtown. Burger Town and the SKN Comm tower have been demolished to make way for the building. Two cranes flank the dominant POI and checkpoints line the entrances. Work your way from ground level including the relocated Burger Town up to the Penthouse and Roof, or latch onto an ascender and get some serious height. New Limited-Time Modes Clash: Two teams of 52 drop into a specific POI within Verdansk. With no Circle Collapse and instant access to your Loadouts, be the first team to earn 500 points by eliminating enemies, completing contracts, and participating in Public Events. Earn upgrades like the new Door Barricade Field Upgrade and the Hand Cannon, spend cash to activate SAM Turrets, and earn powerups that alter the course of the match. Havoc Royale: Compete in a Resurgence mode where modifiers bend the rules in game-changing ways. Survive the havoc, be the last team standing, and claim victory! Resurgence Casual: Drop into a Resurgence match mixing human players and bots. A great mode for warming up, teaching new players about the game, or just chilling out. Mid-Season Loadout Items  Care Package: Deploy this rare throwable to summon an aerial drop with the chance to obtain rare equipment, the Specialist Perk, and more. Perk: Loot Master: Available only in Resurgence and Plunder, gear up faster by increasing the amount of loot you find while opening caches, including an increased drop rate for equipped weapon ammo, Tacticals and Lethals, cash, Field Upgrades, Killstreaks, and other high-tier gear. General Overview New Weapons: In the Battle Pass, unlock two rapid fire weapons in the LC10 SMG and the FFAR 1 Assault Rifle. Earn more across multiple seasonal events including the lever-action Essex Model 07 Marksman Rifle, Olympia Special weapon, and the Pickaxe Melee weapon. New Attachments: Lock in with the G-Grip Tactical Foregrip available on most SMGs and Assault Rifles. Get three weapon conversions, including a burst conversion for the Stryder. 22 Pistol and full-auto conversions for the SVD Sniper Rifle and TR2 Marksman Rifle. Events & Ranked Play Earn additional rewards across several in-season events, including coveted items like the Essex Model 07 Marksman Rifle, Stryder .22 3-Round Burst Mod, and the Grim Reaper Scorestreak. Plus, compete in a new season of Ranked Play for Multiplayer and Call of Duty: Warzone, including Ranked Play: Battle Royale and, in Mid-Season, Ranked Play: Resurgence. Play using a competitive ruleset and earn new seasonal rewards based on the highest Rank obtained in the season. Season 04 Battle Pass & Store Content Purchase the Battle Pass to immediately unlock rewards including a seasonal 10% Battle Pass XP Boost, the new “Supermax” Stitch Operator Skin, and more, providing access to over 110 pieces of unlockable content. Plus, earn up to 1,100 COD Points as you progress through the Battle Pass Pages. Get even more with BlackCell. Look for exciting new Store Bundles including the cel-shaded Tracer Pack: Ink and Smoke plus the Tracer Pack: System Breach, Tracer Pack: Olympus Bolt, and much more. Season 04 launches May 29 Black Ops 6 is available now on PlayStation 5 and PlayStation 4. Experience the spy action thriller Campaign, the in-depth tactical chaos of Multiplayer, and soak in the gory glory of round-based Zombies. #call #duty #black #ops #warzone
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    Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 and Warzone Season 4 — full details, live May 29
    Russell Adler didn’t eliminate Vikhor “Stitch” Kuzmin after all, instead confining the villain to an Icelandic black site prison as insurance for a rainy day. That day has come as Adler and crew free their former foe, their only chance to finally crack the Pantheon codenames. Witness the return of Stitch in the massive Season 04 update for Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 and Call of Duty: Warzone, bringing new maps, modes, weapons, and more. Season 04 launches May 29 on PS5 and PS4. Play Video Multiplayer overview New Core 6v6 Maps Shutdown (Launch): Shut off the power to the prison with an attack on a hydroelectric dam in Iceland. Fight over the rugged terrain, dive into the lake, and battle around the damaged turbine. Fugitive (Launch): With the power cut, it’s time to break Stitch out of the black site prison. Infiltrate the frozen compound, climbing, ziplining, and battling over the grounds and in the cell block where alarms warn of the jailbreak. New 2v2/6v6 Strike Maps Blitz (Launch): Traffic comes to a halt as Pantheon agents race towards the prison but get ambushed by the Rogue team. Duck under the bridge for quick cover or trek the cliffside seeking enemy targets. Eclipse (Mid-Season): Stitch arrives in Avalon, slipping into an underground nightclub to discuss business. Battle in the neon lights down the halls and over the dance stage. Remaster, Core 6v6 Map Fringe (Mid-Season): Revisit Fringe, originally featured in Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 and coming to Black Ops 6 reimagined as the grand opening of the Rolling Hills distillery. New Multiplayer Modes Team Elimination (Launch): This twist on Kill Confirmed gives both teams a limited number of lives each round. Eliminated players drop a dog tag on death that can be picked up by the enemy to confirm the kill and drain the opposing team’s remaining lives, or by a teammate to prevent the action. One in the Chamber (Launch Window): One pistol, one bullet, a knife, and three lives. Eliminate enemies to earn more bullets in this Black Ops classic. Party Ops (In-Season): Get the party started in a new Limited-Time Mode arriving later in the season dropping players into a randomized set of themed minigames. Now launching: The Grim Reaper Scorestreak: Grim Reaper (Event Reward): The quad-tube loaded Launcher returns from the original Black Ops, inflicting heavy explosive damage on enemy Operators and Scorestreaks alike.   Zombies overview Returning Mode: Grief (Launch) The fan-favorite competitive Zombies mode returns! This 4v4 indirect PvP mode pits S.A.M. against Director Richtofen as teams pledge their support for one or the other, receiving handler comms guiding them throughout the match. Secure Capture Zones to thwart the enemy with modifiers including reduced damage, drained ammo, slowed movements, and more.  Put your Zombies talents to the test in this mode while competing against real players attempting to survive longer than you and your squad.  New Ammo Mod, GobbleGums, Grim Reaper  Ammo Mod: Shatter Blast: Modify your ammo to explode on contact, dealing armor-piercing damage in a blast radius. Research Major and Minor Augments to specialize Shatter Blast’s abilities in all-new ways. Three New GobbleGums: Chew on Explosive Flourish to trigger an area-of-effect explosion around your Operator when reloading. Pop Flavor Hex to activate a random Ultra GobbleGum, and force eliminated zombies to belch sparkly rainbow bubbles via Rainburps. Grim Reaper: Build the new Support weapon at the Crafting Table and blast those zombies to bits! New Challenges and LTMs Expect an influx of Dark Ops Challenges awarding Calling Cards and bounteous amounts of XP for those able to complete the secret challenges. Play new Limited-Time Modes, including the Starting Room LTM and Abomination Challenge LTM later in the season. Call of Duty: Warzone Overview New Point of Interest: The Overlook Battle up and down The Overlook, a new skyscraper under construction in Downtown. Burger Town and the SKN Comm tower have been demolished to make way for the building. Two cranes flank the dominant POI and checkpoints line the entrances. Work your way from ground level including the relocated Burger Town up to the Penthouse and Roof, or latch onto an ascender and get some serious height. New Limited-Time Modes Clash (Launch): Two teams of 52 drop into a specific POI within Verdansk. With no Circle Collapse and instant access to your Loadouts, be the first team to earn 500 points by eliminating enemies, completing contracts, and participating in Public Events. Earn upgrades like the new Door Barricade Field Upgrade and the Hand Cannon, spend cash to activate SAM Turrets, and earn powerups that alter the course of the match. Havoc Royale (Mid-Season): Compete in a Resurgence mode where modifiers bend the rules in game-changing ways. Survive the havoc, be the last team standing, and claim victory! Resurgence Casual (Mid-Season): Drop into a Resurgence match mixing human players and bots. A great mode for warming up, teaching new players about the game, or just chilling out. Mid-Season Loadout Items  Care Package: Deploy this rare throwable to summon an aerial drop with the chance to obtain rare equipment, the Specialist Perk, and more. Perk: Loot Master: Available only in Resurgence and Plunder, gear up faster by increasing the amount of loot you find while opening caches, including an increased drop rate for equipped weapon ammo, Tacticals and Lethals, cash, Field Upgrades, Killstreaks, and other high-tier gear. General Overview New Weapons: In the Battle Pass, unlock two rapid fire weapons in the LC10 SMG and the FFAR 1 Assault Rifle. Earn more across multiple seasonal events including the lever-action Essex Model 07 Marksman Rifle, Olympia Special weapon, and the Pickaxe Melee weapon. New Attachments: Lock in with the G-Grip Tactical Foregrip available on most SMGs and Assault Rifles. Get three weapon conversions, including a burst conversion for the Stryder. 22 Pistol and full-auto conversions for the SVD Sniper Rifle and TR2 Marksman Rifle. Events & Ranked Play Earn additional rewards across several in-season events, including coveted items like the Essex Model 07 Marksman Rifle, Stryder .22 3-Round Burst Mod, and the Grim Reaper Scorestreak. Plus, compete in a new season of Ranked Play for Multiplayer and Call of Duty: Warzone, including Ranked Play: Battle Royale and, in Mid-Season, Ranked Play: Resurgence. Play using a competitive ruleset and earn new seasonal rewards based on the highest Rank obtained in the season. Season 04 Battle Pass & Store Content Purchase the Battle Pass to immediately unlock rewards including a seasonal 10% Battle Pass XP Boost, the new “Supermax” Stitch Operator Skin, and more, providing access to over 110 pieces of unlockable content. Plus, earn up to 1,100 COD Points as you progress through the Battle Pass Pages. Get even more with BlackCell. Look for exciting new Store Bundles including the cel-shaded Tracer Pack: Ink and Smoke plus the Tracer Pack: System Breach, Tracer Pack: Olympus Bolt, and much more. Season 04 launches May 29 Black Ops 6 is available now on PlayStation 5 and PlayStation 4. Experience the spy action thriller Campaign, the in-depth tactical chaos of Multiplayer, and soak in the gory glory of round-based Zombies.
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  • Popmart has paused all Labubu sales in the UK for safety reasons amid the blind box craze

    Pop Mart has temporarily paused Labubu sales in the UK.

    LILLIAN SUWANRUMPHA/AFP via Getty Images

    2025-05-21T04:26:31Z

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    UK fans of Labubu won't be able to snag the toy in stores for a bit.
    The toy's producer, Pop Mart, said it would temporarily pause physical Labubu sales in the UK.
    It said this was to "ensure the safety" of people after long lines formed outside UK Pop Mart stores.

    Labubu fans in the UK have gone so wild for the toy, its seller has temporarily paused in-store sales.Pop Mart, the Chinese toymaker behind the viral doll that's taking the world by storm, announced the pause in an Instagram post on Tuesday."Due to the increasing demand for our beloved Labubus, we've seen a significant rise in customer turnout on restock days — with long queues forming outside our stores and Roboshops," the toymaker said.Pop Mart sells products in 16 locations across the UK, including the vending machine-style Roboshops."To ensure the safety and comfort of everyone, we will temporarily pause all in-store and roboshop sales of THE MONSTERS plush toys until further notice," Pop Mart added.Pop Mart said online drops of the toy would continue as usual.At least a dozen videos on TikTok of Pop Mart's stores in the UK show snaking lines forming at its entrances ahead of product drops.A video of the Pop Mart in Bullring, a shopping mall in Birmingham, showed a line stretching around the building. Barricades were set up at the start of the line to organize the queue.This comes as Labubu fever spreads from Asia to the West, with fans queuing for hours to get their hands on the furry plushie with serrated teeth.Labubus, which come in various designs, are sold in blind boxes, or toys that are not labeled.Pop Mart staff in Singapore told BI in November that stores are restocked with a few hundred figurines twice a week, but they sell out in minutes.Labubu and The Monsters toy line was a major cash cow for Pop Mart in 2024. According to the company's annual report, its sales totaled 3.04 billion yuan, or about million, which was 23% of Pop Mart's total revenue.Representatives for Pop Mart did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.
    #popmart #has #paused #all #labubu
    Popmart has paused all Labubu sales in the UK for safety reasons amid the blind box craze
    Pop Mart has temporarily paused Labubu sales in the UK. LILLIAN SUWANRUMPHA/AFP via Getty Images 2025-05-21T04:26:31Z d Read in app This story is available exclusively to Business Insider subscribers. Become an Insider and start reading now. Have an account? UK fans of Labubu won't be able to snag the toy in stores for a bit. The toy's producer, Pop Mart, said it would temporarily pause physical Labubu sales in the UK. It said this was to "ensure the safety" of people after long lines formed outside UK Pop Mart stores. Labubu fans in the UK have gone so wild for the toy, its seller has temporarily paused in-store sales.Pop Mart, the Chinese toymaker behind the viral doll that's taking the world by storm, announced the pause in an Instagram post on Tuesday."Due to the increasing demand for our beloved Labubus, we've seen a significant rise in customer turnout on restock days — with long queues forming outside our stores and Roboshops," the toymaker said.Pop Mart sells products in 16 locations across the UK, including the vending machine-style Roboshops."To ensure the safety and comfort of everyone, we will temporarily pause all in-store and roboshop sales of THE MONSTERS plush toys until further notice," Pop Mart added.Pop Mart said online drops of the toy would continue as usual.At least a dozen videos on TikTok of Pop Mart's stores in the UK show snaking lines forming at its entrances ahead of product drops.A video of the Pop Mart in Bullring, a shopping mall in Birmingham, showed a line stretching around the building. Barricades were set up at the start of the line to organize the queue.This comes as Labubu fever spreads from Asia to the West, with fans queuing for hours to get their hands on the furry plushie with serrated teeth.Labubus, which come in various designs, are sold in blind boxes, or toys that are not labeled.Pop Mart staff in Singapore told BI in November that stores are restocked with a few hundred figurines twice a week, but they sell out in minutes.Labubu and The Monsters toy line was a major cash cow for Pop Mart in 2024. According to the company's annual report, its sales totaled 3.04 billion yuan, or about million, which was 23% of Pop Mart's total revenue.Representatives for Pop Mart did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider. #popmart #has #paused #all #labubu
    WWW.BUSINESSINSIDER.COM
    Popmart has paused all Labubu sales in the UK for safety reasons amid the blind box craze
    Pop Mart has temporarily paused Labubu sales in the UK. LILLIAN SUWANRUMPHA/AFP via Getty Images 2025-05-21T04:26:31Z Save Saved Read in app This story is available exclusively to Business Insider subscribers. Become an Insider and start reading now. Have an account? UK fans of Labubu won't be able to snag the toy in stores for a bit. The toy's producer, Pop Mart, said it would temporarily pause physical Labubu sales in the UK. It said this was to "ensure the safety" of people after long lines formed outside UK Pop Mart stores. Labubu fans in the UK have gone so wild for the toy, its seller has temporarily paused in-store sales.Pop Mart, the Chinese toymaker behind the viral $85 doll that's taking the world by storm, announced the pause in an Instagram post on Tuesday."Due to the increasing demand for our beloved Labubus, we've seen a significant rise in customer turnout on restock days — with long queues forming outside our stores and Roboshops," the toymaker said.Pop Mart sells products in 16 locations across the UK, including the vending machine-style Roboshops."To ensure the safety and comfort of everyone, we will temporarily pause all in-store and roboshop sales of THE MONSTERS plush toys until further notice," Pop Mart added.Pop Mart said online drops of the toy would continue as usual.At least a dozen videos on TikTok of Pop Mart's stores in the UK show snaking lines forming at its entrances ahead of product drops.A video of the Pop Mart in Bullring, a shopping mall in Birmingham, showed a line stretching around the building. Barricades were set up at the start of the line to organize the queue.This comes as Labubu fever spreads from Asia to the West, with fans queuing for hours to get their hands on the furry plushie with serrated teeth.Labubus, which come in various designs, are sold in blind boxes, or toys that are not labeled.Pop Mart staff in Singapore told BI in November that stores are restocked with a few hundred figurines twice a week, but they sell out in minutes.Labubu and The Monsters toy line was a major cash cow for Pop Mart in 2024. According to the company's annual report, its sales totaled 3.04 billion yuan, or about $426 million, which was 23% of Pop Mart's total revenue.Representatives for Pop Mart did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.
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  • Rainbow Six Siege X arrives June 10 with a promise of improvements and less toxicity

    Rainbow Six Siege X is coming as a major update to Ubisoft’s competitive esports game on June 10 to the consoles and PC.
    While it’s a major free upgrade for anyone who owns Rainbow Six Siege, the Siege X update introduces free access, allowing new players to experience the tactical action of Siege for free in Unranked, Quick Match, and the all-new 6v6 Dual Front mode.
    The game is debuting on PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, Amazon Luna, and PC via Ubisoft Connect and Steam.
    In Dual Front, attacking and defending Operators join forces, opening up new opportunities to synergize with clever gadget combinations as your team fights to secure enemy zones while defending your own. Plus, Dual Front allows you to respawn, letting you get back to the action quickly.
    Ubisoft has also been working on reducing toxicity in the game, using new technology for detecting the bad actors and rewarding positive behavior in the game as well.
    The game will have “veteran rewards” for those players who have played in the past. The audio system will be more precise, reliable and more immersive.
    The game has modernized maps, destructible ingredients, improved rappel navigation, and more as part of a wide-ranging suite of upgrades, improvements, and refinements.
    June 10 also marks the launch of Operation Daybreakwhich will deliver an Operator remaster for Clash; balancing updates for Jackal, Sledge, Thunderbird, Jäger, and Blackbeard; changes to electricity and limb damage; and more. These updates will be free for all Siege X players, including those who download and play through Free Access.
    Siege X
    Siege X is the next evolution of Rainbow Six Siege that is free for all players who already own the game. It’s also introducing Free Access, which means anyone can hop in for free and play the Quick Match, Unranked, and Dual Front modes, and enjoy all of the upgrades delivered with Siege X.
    Keep an eye out for newly placed destructible ingredients in every map, including explosive gas pipes, vision-clouding smoke detectors, and interactable metal detectors. Player movement will be more fluid thanks to the advanced rappel navigation allowing sprinting and turning corners, as well as the momentum movement improvement.
    Siege X also introduces map modernization, a process through which the Siege team improves existing maps with boast new lighting and shadows, as well as higher resolution. Five maps will be modernized on June 10, with three more maps getting the upgrade each season. The audio system is also being overhauled, the result of which will be clearer, more accurate audio cues to help you gain richer intel about what’s happening around you.
    You’ll be able to make callouts more effectively with the new communication wheel, and show off your cosmetic style with the new weapon inspect feature. And whether you’re refining your competitive strategy with the new pick and ban system in Ranked matches, or learning the ropes faster and more thoroughly with the new onboarding flow, you’ll benefit from the extensive upgrades and refinements throughout the game. More details can be found in our Siege X Showcase recap article from the Siege X Showcase in March.
    At the recent RE:LO:AD esports event in Rio de Janeiro, more details were revealed on updates coming with Siege X, including an in-game esports tab that will allow easy access to keep up with the best Siege competition around the globe.
    New beginner challenges and onboarding flow will offer in-game rewards to diligent new players, and experienced players will progress faster through the clearance levels with a new XP curve. Follow your progress with the new career stats tracker as you review your performance in different playlists by checking your stats, including the K.O.S.T. stat that esports fans will recognize as a popular metric in pro play.
    The new Enlisted and Field Training playlists will cater to new and returning players, respectively, giving each a customizable practice arena to fight on full maps against AI bots trained on real player behaviors. Whether you’re training solo or playing matches against other players, you’ll now hear the voices of the Operators more often as the new Operator banter feature will bring new dialogue lines that illuminate the personalities and relationships between the characters.
    PC players can get an early taste of Siege X in action in the test server session, starting on May 20 at 6 AM PT/3 PM CEST and running through June 9 at 6 AM PT/3 PM CEST. The session is open to all players who already own Rainbow Six Siege on PC, and the test server tile should automatically appear in your Ubisoft Connect library. If it doesn’t, you can register for the test server via the Ubisoft Connect website.
    Operation DaybreakSiege X will feature Operation Daybreak.
    Coinciding with the launch of Siege X is the start of Operation Daybreak, the second season of Rainbow Six Siege Year 10. This season brings of host of balancing updates for various Operators, changes to electricity and limb damage, as well as an Operator remaster for Clash.
    Clash is the first Defender to ever wield a shield, and it’s her CCE Shield that has received some significant upgrades. She can now deploy her CCE Shield MK2, freeing her to move more quickly and position herself to play off of her shield’s stationary position. While the shield is deployed, Clash can operate its taser remotely, applying the shocking and slowing effect in a broad cone-shaped area. Defenders looking to remove this obstacle can use explosives or, if they get close enough, simply burst through the shield and destroy it.
    Clash can still play with her shield in-hand or on her back as well, and it’s been updated to automatically collapse and expand as she sprints, crouches, vaults, and crashes through barricades. She can deploy it, pick it back up, and put down somewhere else. It’s more nimble, more versatile, and gives Clash more ways to be an absolute force on the defending team.
    Some notable balancing updates will also arrive with Operation Daybreak.
    Electricity will no longer damage any Operators. It will be a neutral element that will still have a slowing effect on Operators, and will destroy gadgets regardless of team affiliation.
    Limb damage will be reduced, making it more important than ever to aim for center mass or heads.
    Shield Operators will no longer be able to aim down sights while vaulting or dropping from higher levels.
    Blackbeard’s shield glass has been tinted to make it easier to see if it’s up or down.
    Jackal will only ping an enemy position one time after scanning footprints, and the footprints will disappear immediately after being scanned. He will also be able to use it five times, an increase from the current three.
    Jäger will now be able to eliminate Capitão’s bolts and Gridlock’s Trax Stingers with his Active Defense System.
    Thunderbird will no longer allow enemies to heal from her Kona Stations.
    Sledge will be able to knock down shield users he comes across.
    Operation Daybreak is launching on June 10, read the full news breakdown on the official Rainbow Six Siege website.
    R6 ShieldGuard and Anti-Toxicity
    Introduced earlier this year, R6 ShieldGuard is the unification of game security and anti-cheat tools developed by the Rainbow Six Siege team to help ensure fair competition for everyone. Thanks to the introduction of new security hardening tech in Season 1, Operation Prep Phase, cheat reports are trending down as more cheaters are being banned.
    Season 2 will bring a major security update as well as a powerful change to how updates are delivered. Soon, the unified anti-cheat system will be fully dynamic, allowing the dev team to push a new game executable directly to players at any time during the season and making it significantly more difficult for cheat-makers to adapt. This proactive approach will continue throughout Seasons 3 & 4 as the team works with pro players and the community to continually refine their systems.
    In addition to protecting the competitive fairness of Siege X, the team is also focused on making the game more respectful and secure for all players. The now-fully activated Reputation System has seen the number of negative actions decrease, including a drop in abusive language, while text chat usage has increased along with reports of positive actions in-game. Seasons 3 & 4 will continue to bolster these efforts with voice chat moderation, new Reputation System actions, and improvements to privacy settings, abandon penalties, and in-game reports.
    Seasons 3 & 4
    Rainbow Six Siege X specs on PC.
    Looking ahead to seasons beyond Operation Daybreak, the Siege X team has shared some tidbits about what’s on the roadmap for later this year. Season 3 will bring three more modernized maps – Nighthaven, Lair, and Consulate – as well as assignment changes in Dual Front with narrative ties to the new Operator. This new Defender will hail from Switzerland and introduce a new weapon to the game. Players looking for a true competitive challenge will have plenty of opportunities when the Siege Cup becomes available every weekend, and allows you to inspect the stats of your opponents before the match begins. Plus, be on the lookout for a returning Halloween event on a new map.
    Season 4 will mark the 10-year anniversary of Rainbow Six Siege, and a special in-game event is planned to celebrate the occasion. The season will also deliver an Operator remaster of an Attacker, as well as another new weapon that will, for the first time, be available for multiple Operators upon release.
    Two more modernized maps are inbound – Theme Park and Skyscraper – in addition to a full rework and modernization for a third map. Significant updates for the training modes, including Keres Legion targets instead of test dummies, are also coming in Season 4, plus improvements to ranked matchmaking, a new Dual Front assignment, and continued balancing work that will address EMP and jamming systems. Finally, a new playlist called Testing Grounds will serve as a place for the team to explore new ideas and gather feedback as they shape the future of Siege X.
    The full reveals of seasons 3 & 4 will come later in 2025, but suffice to say it’s a big year for Rainbow Six Siege X. The Year 10 dynamic roadmap is also available on the official Rainbow Six Siege website.
    Rainbow Six Siege X is available on PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, and PC via Ubisoft Connect, Steam, and Epic Games, as well as with a Ubisoft+ Premium subscription.

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    #rainbow #six #siege #arrives #june
    Rainbow Six Siege X arrives June 10 with a promise of improvements and less toxicity
    Rainbow Six Siege X is coming as a major update to Ubisoft’s competitive esports game on June 10 to the consoles and PC. While it’s a major free upgrade for anyone who owns Rainbow Six Siege, the Siege X update introduces free access, allowing new players to experience the tactical action of Siege for free in Unranked, Quick Match, and the all-new 6v6 Dual Front mode. The game is debuting on PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, Amazon Luna, and PC via Ubisoft Connect and Steam. In Dual Front, attacking and defending Operators join forces, opening up new opportunities to synergize with clever gadget combinations as your team fights to secure enemy zones while defending your own. Plus, Dual Front allows you to respawn, letting you get back to the action quickly. Ubisoft has also been working on reducing toxicity in the game, using new technology for detecting the bad actors and rewarding positive behavior in the game as well. The game will have “veteran rewards” for those players who have played in the past. The audio system will be more precise, reliable and more immersive. The game has modernized maps, destructible ingredients, improved rappel navigation, and more as part of a wide-ranging suite of upgrades, improvements, and refinements. June 10 also marks the launch of Operation Daybreakwhich will deliver an Operator remaster for Clash; balancing updates for Jackal, Sledge, Thunderbird, Jäger, and Blackbeard; changes to electricity and limb damage; and more. These updates will be free for all Siege X players, including those who download and play through Free Access. Siege X Siege X is the next evolution of Rainbow Six Siege that is free for all players who already own the game. It’s also introducing Free Access, which means anyone can hop in for free and play the Quick Match, Unranked, and Dual Front modes, and enjoy all of the upgrades delivered with Siege X. Keep an eye out for newly placed destructible ingredients in every map, including explosive gas pipes, vision-clouding smoke detectors, and interactable metal detectors. Player movement will be more fluid thanks to the advanced rappel navigation allowing sprinting and turning corners, as well as the momentum movement improvement. Siege X also introduces map modernization, a process through which the Siege team improves existing maps with boast new lighting and shadows, as well as higher resolution. Five maps will be modernized on June 10, with three more maps getting the upgrade each season. The audio system is also being overhauled, the result of which will be clearer, more accurate audio cues to help you gain richer intel about what’s happening around you. You’ll be able to make callouts more effectively with the new communication wheel, and show off your cosmetic style with the new weapon inspect feature. And whether you’re refining your competitive strategy with the new pick and ban system in Ranked matches, or learning the ropes faster and more thoroughly with the new onboarding flow, you’ll benefit from the extensive upgrades and refinements throughout the game. More details can be found in our Siege X Showcase recap article from the Siege X Showcase in March. At the recent RE:LO:AD esports event in Rio de Janeiro, more details were revealed on updates coming with Siege X, including an in-game esports tab that will allow easy access to keep up with the best Siege competition around the globe. New beginner challenges and onboarding flow will offer in-game rewards to diligent new players, and experienced players will progress faster through the clearance levels with a new XP curve. Follow your progress with the new career stats tracker as you review your performance in different playlists by checking your stats, including the K.O.S.T. stat that esports fans will recognize as a popular metric in pro play. The new Enlisted and Field Training playlists will cater to new and returning players, respectively, giving each a customizable practice arena to fight on full maps against AI bots trained on real player behaviors. Whether you’re training solo or playing matches against other players, you’ll now hear the voices of the Operators more often as the new Operator banter feature will bring new dialogue lines that illuminate the personalities and relationships between the characters. PC players can get an early taste of Siege X in action in the test server session, starting on May 20 at 6 AM PT/3 PM CEST and running through June 9 at 6 AM PT/3 PM CEST. The session is open to all players who already own Rainbow Six Siege on PC, and the test server tile should automatically appear in your Ubisoft Connect library. If it doesn’t, you can register for the test server via the Ubisoft Connect website. Operation DaybreakSiege X will feature Operation Daybreak. Coinciding with the launch of Siege X is the start of Operation Daybreak, the second season of Rainbow Six Siege Year 10. This season brings of host of balancing updates for various Operators, changes to electricity and limb damage, as well as an Operator remaster for Clash. Clash is the first Defender to ever wield a shield, and it’s her CCE Shield that has received some significant upgrades. She can now deploy her CCE Shield MK2, freeing her to move more quickly and position herself to play off of her shield’s stationary position. While the shield is deployed, Clash can operate its taser remotely, applying the shocking and slowing effect in a broad cone-shaped area. Defenders looking to remove this obstacle can use explosives or, if they get close enough, simply burst through the shield and destroy it. Clash can still play with her shield in-hand or on her back as well, and it’s been updated to automatically collapse and expand as she sprints, crouches, vaults, and crashes through barricades. She can deploy it, pick it back up, and put down somewhere else. It’s more nimble, more versatile, and gives Clash more ways to be an absolute force on the defending team. Some notable balancing updates will also arrive with Operation Daybreak. Electricity will no longer damage any Operators. It will be a neutral element that will still have a slowing effect on Operators, and will destroy gadgets regardless of team affiliation. Limb damage will be reduced, making it more important than ever to aim for center mass or heads. Shield Operators will no longer be able to aim down sights while vaulting or dropping from higher levels. Blackbeard’s shield glass has been tinted to make it easier to see if it’s up or down. Jackal will only ping an enemy position one time after scanning footprints, and the footprints will disappear immediately after being scanned. He will also be able to use it five times, an increase from the current three. Jäger will now be able to eliminate Capitão’s bolts and Gridlock’s Trax Stingers with his Active Defense System. Thunderbird will no longer allow enemies to heal from her Kona Stations. Sledge will be able to knock down shield users he comes across. Operation Daybreak is launching on June 10, read the full news breakdown on the official Rainbow Six Siege website. R6 ShieldGuard and Anti-Toxicity Introduced earlier this year, R6 ShieldGuard is the unification of game security and anti-cheat tools developed by the Rainbow Six Siege team to help ensure fair competition for everyone. Thanks to the introduction of new security hardening tech in Season 1, Operation Prep Phase, cheat reports are trending down as more cheaters are being banned. Season 2 will bring a major security update as well as a powerful change to how updates are delivered. Soon, the unified anti-cheat system will be fully dynamic, allowing the dev team to push a new game executable directly to players at any time during the season and making it significantly more difficult for cheat-makers to adapt. This proactive approach will continue throughout Seasons 3 & 4 as the team works with pro players and the community to continually refine their systems. In addition to protecting the competitive fairness of Siege X, the team is also focused on making the game more respectful and secure for all players. The now-fully activated Reputation System has seen the number of negative actions decrease, including a drop in abusive language, while text chat usage has increased along with reports of positive actions in-game. Seasons 3 & 4 will continue to bolster these efforts with voice chat moderation, new Reputation System actions, and improvements to privacy settings, abandon penalties, and in-game reports. Seasons 3 & 4 Rainbow Six Siege X specs on PC. Looking ahead to seasons beyond Operation Daybreak, the Siege X team has shared some tidbits about what’s on the roadmap for later this year. Season 3 will bring three more modernized maps – Nighthaven, Lair, and Consulate – as well as assignment changes in Dual Front with narrative ties to the new Operator. This new Defender will hail from Switzerland and introduce a new weapon to the game. Players looking for a true competitive challenge will have plenty of opportunities when the Siege Cup becomes available every weekend, and allows you to inspect the stats of your opponents before the match begins. Plus, be on the lookout for a returning Halloween event on a new map. Season 4 will mark the 10-year anniversary of Rainbow Six Siege, and a special in-game event is planned to celebrate the occasion. The season will also deliver an Operator remaster of an Attacker, as well as another new weapon that will, for the first time, be available for multiple Operators upon release. Two more modernized maps are inbound – Theme Park and Skyscraper – in addition to a full rework and modernization for a third map. Significant updates for the training modes, including Keres Legion targets instead of test dummies, are also coming in Season 4, plus improvements to ranked matchmaking, a new Dual Front assignment, and continued balancing work that will address EMP and jamming systems. Finally, a new playlist called Testing Grounds will serve as a place for the team to explore new ideas and gather feedback as they shape the future of Siege X. The full reveals of seasons 3 & 4 will come later in 2025, but suffice to say it’s a big year for Rainbow Six Siege X. The Year 10 dynamic roadmap is also available on the official Rainbow Six Siege website. Rainbow Six Siege X is available on PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, and PC via Ubisoft Connect, Steam, and Epic Games, as well as with a Ubisoft+ Premium subscription. GB Daily Stay in the know! Get the latest news in your inbox daily Read our Privacy Policy Thanks for subscribing. Check out more VB newsletters here. An error occured. #rainbow #six #siege #arrives #june
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    Rainbow Six Siege X arrives June 10 with a promise of improvements and less toxicity
    Rainbow Six Siege X is coming as a major update to Ubisoft’s competitive esports game on June 10 to the consoles and PC. While it’s a major free upgrade for anyone who owns Rainbow Six Siege, the Siege X update introduces free access, allowing new players to experience the tactical action of Siege for free in Unranked, Quick Match, and the all-new 6v6 Dual Front mode. The game is debuting on PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, Amazon Luna, and PC via Ubisoft Connect and Steam. In Dual Front, attacking and defending Operators join forces, opening up new opportunities to synergize with clever gadget combinations as your team fights to secure enemy zones while defending your own. Plus, Dual Front allows you to respawn, letting you get back to the action quickly. Ubisoft has also been working on reducing toxicity in the game, using new technology for detecting the bad actors and rewarding positive behavior in the game as well. The game will have “veteran rewards” for those players who have played in the past. The audio system will be more precise, reliable and more immersive. The game has modernized maps, destructible ingredients, improved rappel navigation, and more as part of a wide-ranging suite of upgrades, improvements, and refinements. June 10 also marks the launch of Operation Daybreak (Year 10 Season 2) which will deliver an Operator remaster for Clash; balancing updates for Jackal, Sledge, Thunderbird, Jäger, and Blackbeard; changes to electricity and limb damage; and more. These updates will be free for all Siege X players, including those who download and play through Free Access. Siege X Siege X is the next evolution of Rainbow Six Siege that is free for all players who already own the game. It’s also introducing Free Access, which means anyone can hop in for free and play the Quick Match, Unranked, and Dual Front modes, and enjoy all of the upgrades delivered with Siege X. Keep an eye out for newly placed destructible ingredients in every map, including explosive gas pipes, vision-clouding smoke detectors, and interactable metal detectors. Player movement will be more fluid thanks to the advanced rappel navigation allowing sprinting and turning corners, as well as the momentum movement improvement. Siege X also introduces map modernization, a process through which the Siege team improves existing maps with boast new lighting and shadows, as well as higher resolution. Five maps will be modernized on June 10, with three more maps getting the upgrade each season. The audio system is also being overhauled, the result of which will be clearer, more accurate audio cues to help you gain richer intel about what’s happening around you. You’ll be able to make callouts more effectively with the new communication wheel, and show off your cosmetic style with the new weapon inspect feature. And whether you’re refining your competitive strategy with the new pick and ban system in Ranked matches, or learning the ropes faster and more thoroughly with the new onboarding flow, you’ll benefit from the extensive upgrades and refinements throughout the game. More details can be found in our Siege X Showcase recap article from the Siege X Showcase in March. At the recent RE:LO:AD esports event in Rio de Janeiro, more details were revealed on updates coming with Siege X, including an in-game esports tab that will allow easy access to keep up with the best Siege competition around the globe. New beginner challenges and onboarding flow will offer in-game rewards to diligent new players, and experienced players will progress faster through the clearance levels with a new XP curve. Follow your progress with the new career stats tracker as you review your performance in different playlists by checking your stats, including the K.O.S.T. stat that esports fans will recognize as a popular metric in pro play. The new Enlisted and Field Training playlists will cater to new and returning players, respectively, giving each a customizable practice arena to fight on full maps against AI bots trained on real player behaviors. Whether you’re training solo or playing matches against other players, you’ll now hear the voices of the Operators more often as the new Operator banter feature will bring new dialogue lines that illuminate the personalities and relationships between the characters. PC players can get an early taste of Siege X in action in the test server session, starting on May 20 at 6 AM PT/3 PM CEST and running through June 9 at 6 AM PT/3 PM CEST. The session is open to all players who already own Rainbow Six Siege on PC, and the test server tile should automatically appear in your Ubisoft Connect library. If it doesn’t, you can register for the test server via the Ubisoft Connect website. Operation Daybreak (Season 2) Siege X will feature Operation Daybreak. Coinciding with the launch of Siege X is the start of Operation Daybreak, the second season of Rainbow Six Siege Year 10. This season brings of host of balancing updates for various Operators, changes to electricity and limb damage, as well as an Operator remaster for Clash. Clash is the first Defender to ever wield a shield, and it’s her CCE Shield that has received some significant upgrades. She can now deploy her CCE Shield MK2, freeing her to move more quickly and position herself to play off of her shield’s stationary position. While the shield is deployed, Clash can operate its taser remotely, applying the shocking and slowing effect in a broad cone-shaped area. Defenders looking to remove this obstacle can use explosives or, if they get close enough, simply burst through the shield and destroy it (but beware, Clash or her allies can also execute this burst-through maneuver for a surprise attack). Clash can still play with her shield in-hand or on her back as well, and it’s been updated to automatically collapse and expand as she sprints, crouches, vaults, and crashes through barricades. She can deploy it, pick it back up, and put down somewhere else. It’s more nimble, more versatile, and gives Clash more ways to be an absolute force on the defending team. Some notable balancing updates will also arrive with Operation Daybreak. Electricity will no longer damage any Operators. It will be a neutral element that will still have a slowing effect on Operators, and will destroy gadgets regardless of team affiliation. Limb damage will be reduced, making it more important than ever to aim for center mass or heads. Shield Operators will no longer be able to aim down sights while vaulting or dropping from higher levels. Blackbeard’s shield glass has been tinted to make it easier to see if it’s up or down. Jackal will only ping an enemy position one time after scanning footprints, and the footprints will disappear immediately after being scanned. He will also be able to use it five times, an increase from the current three. Jäger will now be able to eliminate Capitão’s bolts and Gridlock’s Trax Stingers with his Active Defense System. Thunderbird will no longer allow enemies to heal from her Kona Stations (unless Brava’s Kludge Drone takes them over). Sledge will be able to knock down shield users he comes across (which he is likely to do more often now that attackers and defenders can be on the same team in Dual Front). Operation Daybreak is launching on June 10, read the full news breakdown on the official Rainbow Six Siege website. R6 ShieldGuard and Anti-Toxicity Introduced earlier this year, R6 ShieldGuard is the unification of game security and anti-cheat tools developed by the Rainbow Six Siege team to help ensure fair competition for everyone. Thanks to the introduction of new security hardening tech in Season 1, Operation Prep Phase, cheat reports are trending down as more cheaters are being banned. Season 2 will bring a major security update as well as a powerful change to how updates are delivered. Soon, the unified anti-cheat system will be fully dynamic, allowing the dev team to push a new game executable directly to players at any time during the season and making it significantly more difficult for cheat-makers to adapt. This proactive approach will continue throughout Seasons 3 & 4 as the team works with pro players and the community to continually refine their systems. In addition to protecting the competitive fairness of Siege X, the team is also focused on making the game more respectful and secure for all players. The now-fully activated Reputation System has seen the number of negative actions decrease, including a drop in abusive language, while text chat usage has increased along with reports of positive actions in-game. Seasons 3 & 4 will continue to bolster these efforts with voice chat moderation, new Reputation System actions, and improvements to privacy settings, abandon penalties, and in-game reports. Seasons 3 & 4 Rainbow Six Siege X specs on PC. Looking ahead to seasons beyond Operation Daybreak, the Siege X team has shared some tidbits about what’s on the roadmap for later this year. Season 3 will bring three more modernized maps – Nighthaven, Lair, and Consulate – as well as assignment changes in Dual Front with narrative ties to the new Operator. This new Defender will hail from Switzerland and introduce a new weapon to the game. Players looking for a true competitive challenge will have plenty of opportunities when the Siege Cup becomes available every weekend, and allows you to inspect the stats of your opponents before the match begins. Plus, be on the lookout for a returning Halloween event on a new map. Season 4 will mark the 10-year anniversary of Rainbow Six Siege, and a special in-game event is planned to celebrate the occasion. The season will also deliver an Operator remaster of an Attacker, as well as another new weapon that will, for the first time, be available for multiple Operators upon release (first as part of the battlepass, and later to everyone). Two more modernized maps are inbound – Theme Park and Skyscraper – in addition to a full rework and modernization for a third map. Significant updates for the training modes, including Keres Legion targets instead of test dummies, are also coming in Season 4, plus improvements to ranked matchmaking, a new Dual Front assignment, and continued balancing work that will address EMP and jamming systems. Finally, a new playlist called Testing Grounds will serve as a place for the team to explore new ideas and gather feedback as they shape the future of Siege X. The full reveals of seasons 3 & 4 will come later in 2025, but suffice to say it’s a big year for Rainbow Six Siege X. The Year 10 dynamic roadmap is also available on the official Rainbow Six Siege website. Rainbow Six Siege X is available on PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, and PC via Ubisoft Connect, Steam, and Epic Games, as well as with a Ubisoft+ Premium subscription. GB Daily Stay in the know! Get the latest news in your inbox daily Read our Privacy Policy Thanks for subscribing. Check out more VB newsletters here. An error occured.
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  • Final Destination: Bloodlines Ending Explained - Does It Set Up Final Destination 7?

    Let's make this simple: You want to know if there are any post- or mid-credits scenes in Final Destination: Bloodlines. The answer is no. There weren't any credits scenes in the first five movies and there isn’t one in the sixth either!There is some imagery that runs along with the credits which is fun to check out though.Full spoilers for the moviefollow!Final Destination: Bloodlines manages to have fun with the formula of the series, both sticking to the basic scenario fans expect – someone’s premonition of an impending terrible tragedy leads them to escape that tragedy alongside a group of others, only for Death itself to kill those who escaped it one by one in elaborate ways – while also introducing its own specifics that make it feel a bit different and fresh. Let’s break down the ending of the film and how it relates to the series as a whole…The Best Final Destination DeathsThe Set-UpIn Bloodlines, Iris, the woman who had the premonition of the collapse of the high-rise Skyview Restaurant Tower, did so way way back in 1968. And unlike in the previous films, where many still died in the actual disaster except the few people who left thanks to the premonition, in this situation, Iris saved all of the hundreds of people packing the restaurant that night, who were evacuated thanks to her warning. Slowly but surely, Death did come after them for escaping its grasp, except there were extenuating circumstances, since so many of these people went on to have children and sometimes grandchildren. So Death, always so tidy and persistent, has spent the last 57 years killing not only each survivor off but the entire bloodline that has resulted from each person, since by Death’s rules, they shouldn’t have existed in the first place.. Now, Death’s work on Project: Skyviewis nearly complete, and Iris’ family remains his big unfinished task – all of which starts to become clear to Iris’ granddaughter Stefaniwhen she begins having nightmares of Iris’ Skyview premonition, leading her to seek out the grandmother she’d never met, and who she was always told was crazy. PlayFinal Destination: Bloodlines Ending ExplainedA Reunion to Die ForStefani is initially skeptical of Iris’ story and the reason she now has spent years barricaded inside a house she’s attempted to death-proof to protect herself the best she can, even as she tells Stefani she now is dying from cancer and thus won’t be able to escape Death much longer. But when the still disbelieving Stefani goes outside to leave, Iris impulsively runs after her to ensure Stefani takes the book in which Iris has collected her findings on what happened to all those who survived Skyview and how to try to avoid literal Death traps - and decides to prove what she knows about Death’s plan by staying outside long enough for a weather vane to snap off and impale her in front of Stefani. Soon enough, with Iris dead, Death now goes after everyone else in the family, which includes Stefani’s brother and her estranged mother, plus her uncle and three cousins. And after Uncle Howardand his daughter Juliaboth go out in classic Final Destination scenarios involving a lawnmower and a garbage truck, the rest of the family is suddenly much more onboard with the claims of both Stefani and her mother Darlene- the latter of whom returns after years in self-exile because her own erratic behavior thanks to her mother’s “Death is everywhere” teachings had made her fear how she was raising her kids. Tony Todd’s Final Appearance: One Last Message From an IconMaking an emotional final appearance as his second most famous horror character after Candyman, the late, great Tony Todd – who passed away a few months after production wrapped on Bloodlines – returns as Final Destination regular William Bludworth, who Stefani and her family encounter at a hospital, learning he is the “JB” Iris referred to in her book. It turns out JB is a nickname his friends use, based off of his full name being William John Bludworth. It’s a fun way to suddenly add some personal touches to a character who was so enigmatic in his previous appearances that this is the first time since we met him 25 years ago that his name has been spoken out loud. Bludworth is only in the one scene, which was the norm for Todd’s role in this franchise, but it’s a big one for several reasons, effectively bidding a well-earned fond farewell to both the character and the man who played him. PlayBeyond his middle name and a nickname we didn’t know before, Bludworth reveals much more, including that he was the little boy who Iris tried to help in her premonition in 1968, in which the two of them died last in the tower collapse, making him the other last target Death has been seeking among those who survived the Skyview. Now though, like Iris did, he has terminal cancer and his time is nearly up once Iris’ family are all gone. Todd himself was sadly in the final stages of stomach cancer when he shot Final Destination: Bloodlines and the filmmakers have noted all involved understood the situation and why it was important to properly say goodbye to the character while, most importantly, giving Todd his due. As Bloodlines co-director Zach Lipovsky explained to IGN, “We’re really grateful that we had the ability to, from the beginning, design that experience for the audience with Tony and with all the writers and everybody. We knew he was ill for quite a while and he was extremely excited to be in the movie. He was very grateful for the ability to participate in the film and he was so joyful on set when he was there and he was cracking jokes and really excited to just have his ability to be in the film and give his character a lot more backstory. We give a lot of answers to who Bludworth is in the film, which is something that during the franchise, people have been clamoring for for a really long time. But we also knew that this was also going to be a goodbye of the character. And that's something that we worked very closely with him, to figure out really the best way of doing that, because these films are about death and his mortality was very present as we were working with him.” Bludworth tells Stefani and the others there are two known methods to actually cheat Death, in a moment that is rather exciting for longtime Final Destination fans in terms of acknowledging previous lore. First, as established in Final Destination 5, you can take the life of someone else - basically using that other person as a sacrifice, with you now getting the “credit” for the time your victim naturally had left to live, or even potentially some extra credit if they had decades and decades more to go before they would have died. But perhaps more importantly, because it’s the only way Bludworth knows of to save everyone still alive involved in a situation like this, is the cheat introduced in Final Destination 2 where clinically dying but then being resuscitated breaks Death’s chain completely. Which means if one of the family can pull this off, they can all be saved. But Bludworth says only one person has ever done this successfully. He had this sort of mischievous smile, even when he delivers that line and then says, ‘Good luck.’ -Co-director Zach Lipovsky on shooting Tony Todd's final scene“Todd’s scene ends with Bludworth revealing that he is going to retire and enjoy the time he has left and then his final words get notably poignant for a Final Destination film - something Lipovsky credits fully to Todd. “One of the unique opportunities that came up was that near the end of that scene, we asked him to actually throw away the script for a moment and just speak from the heart as to everything that he was thinking about as far as what the movie was about, what the franchise has been about, but also just what life's about and what is it all about in the end. And the take that's in the film where he says, ‘Life is precious. Cherish every second because you never know when…’ And the earnestness that he says that with all came in the moment from him. And I think you really feel that when you watch the movie that he's obviously speaking as a character who knows that their death is coming, but he's also speaking as an actor who's speaking to the audience as far as what's important in life. And that was a really powerful moment on set when we filmed that with him.” Not surprisingly, it was a highly emotional day on set when Todd shot his scene, but Lipovsky loves how Todd’s actual final words of “Good luck” to the other charactersand how he delivers them let him also meld the actor and Bludworth together further.“He had this sort of mischievous smile, even when he delivers that line and then says, ‘Good luck’ in the way that he has – that sort of dark, mischievous way as he goes out the door – he knew exactly what he was doing and he relished.” Final Destination: Bloodline GalleryFarewell to the Family While still at the hospital, Stefani’s cousins Erikand Bobbyare the next to go. Technically, Erik wasn’t on Death’s list because he doesn’t share Iris’ bloodline – he’s shocked to discover he was the result of an affair his mother Brendahad – but he gets taken out too when he attempts to break the chain by “killing” his brother using Bobby’s peanut allergy before rushing him to the ER to be revived. However, an errant, Death-controlled MRI machine acting like it’s Magneto on a rampage pulls the piercing-laden Erik towards it, who is then snapped in half when a wheelchair shoves him into the MRI machine in a very unrecommended manner - and then Bobby is stabbed by a projectile-powered spring from a vending machine, which drills into his head. With Uncle Howard’s side of the family all gone, it’s just Stefani and her brother Charlieand Darlene left. Given all Iris did to keep it safe for herself inside, they decide to go to Iris’ abandoned cabin, with Darlene intending to now live the isolated life her mother did - because if Death can’t get to her, it can’t move on to her kids. But when they arrive, Death does its best to keep them out, with the RV crashing and Stefani submerged in water as a result, while the house itself gets set on fire and explodes. Darlene is then killed when a post falls onto her but Charlie gets to his sister, who has seemingly drowned, and performs CPR on her. He is able to save her, and in the process, seems to have finally stopped Death from continuing to hunt them. The siblings laugh, thinking they’ve escaped - before one of the train cars suddenly pivots, sending huge logs flying which crush and kill Stefani and Charlie.“Sometime later, Charlie is getting ready for prom night alongside his dad and sister and it’s mentioned to his date’s father, who’s a doctor, how Charlie brought Stefani back from the dead. However, the doctor then tells them that, considering how quickly Stefani was revived, she was unconscious but never actually clinically dead… which means Death was never truly thwarted.And that’s when a train passing by crashes and derails, skidding through the street and seemingly aiming right for Stefani and Charlie, who desperately try to outrun it. It comes to a stop and the siblings laugh, thinking they’ve escaped - before one of the train cars suddenly pivots on its side, sending huge logs it was carrying flying through the air, which crush and kill Stefani and Charlie, in a callback to one of the franchise’s most famous and most meme’d moments. Does Final Destination Bloodlines Have a Mid- or Post-Credit Scene?Not really, but there are some visuals accompanying the closing credits that focus on articles Iris had collected in her book about various notable deaths through the years, intercut with quick footage from some of those tragedies - before we end on the newest article, reporting on Stefani and Charlie’s bizarre death. PlayBut Does Bloodlines Set Up Final Destination 7 in Any Way?The sixth Final Destination movie doesn’t really offer any set-up for a seventh installment… unless it does? This is a franchise that has never been about heavy serialization. Only the second movie was truly a direct sequel with explicit plot threads to the movie that preceded it, including a prominent returning character in the form of Ali Larter’s Clear Rivers. But following that film – and Clear dying in it – the series consisted of nearly entirely standalone stories that introduced a brand new group of characters each time, with the exception of a possible William Bludworth scene. And having new characters made sense, because Final Destination 3, 4 and 5, as with Bloodlines now, also made sure there were zero survivors among their crop of new Death targets. Along with Bludworth, the only real recurring element beyond the core concept was that the strange occurrences of the first film’s Flight 180 explosion and the ill-fated group who initially escaped that scenario were at least somewhat well known and would usually be brought up at some point, but even then, usually in a nebulous manner.To have Final Destination 2's Kimberly brought up makes it hard not to wonder if there might be plans for her going forward as someone with important information for those wishing to stop Death.“All of which is to say that it really stands out in Final Destination: Bloodlines when Bludworth, while explaining how you can actually cheat Death – and talking about the only person who did it – says the name Kimberly Corman. Played by AJ Cook, Kimberly Corman was the main character in 2003’s Final Destination 2, and following multiple mentions in Bloodlines of the “survivor” Iris wrote about “JB” finding in her book, Bludworth specifically mentions Kimberly as the one and only person who’s ever fully cheated Death without it coming back around on her. In Final Destination 2’s conclusion, Kimberly purposely drove into a lake and drowned and was truly clinically dead briefly before a doctor resuscitated her.Longtime mega-fans of the series may recall that the Final Destination 3 DVD had a “Choose Their Fate” interactive special feature where you could see alternate scenarios from what occurred in the film. And in one of them, a headline did report on Kimberly and Burke’s eventual deaths. But that version of the story was never canon and now Bludworth’s information in Bloodlines confirms Kimberly’s method really and truly worked and she’s still alive. It’s been 22 years since we’ve seen Kimberly or Burke but to have Kimberly’s name suddenly brought up in this manner makes it hard not to wonder if there might be plans for her going forward as someone with important information for those wishing to stop Death in the future - especially given that, with Bludworth no longer an option, this series is probably in need of a new Person Who Knows Things for the newbies to go to, given sticking only to internet searches for your characters just isn’t cinematically exciting. And look, AJ Cook’s been plenty busy for the past couple of decades as a cast member on Criminal Minds, but maybe she can still take a break to go deal with Death once again. Of course, there’s also Iris’ book and all of the information she’s gathered as a notable remaining element, and it does stand out that Stefani’s father Martyand Aunt Brenda are both alive at the end of the film, thanks to not being part of Iris’ bloodline. Could either one of them or Iris’ book play a role in the future, at least as far as briefly appearing to pass on what they know? We’ll have to see what Death’s – and the Final Destination producers’ – design is.What did you think of Bloodlines? Let’s discuss in the comments!Note: This story was updated with full spoilers on May 16, 2025.
    #final #destination #bloodlines #ending #explained
    Final Destination: Bloodlines Ending Explained - Does It Set Up Final Destination 7?
    Let's make this simple: You want to know if there are any post- or mid-credits scenes in Final Destination: Bloodlines. The answer is no. There weren't any credits scenes in the first five movies and there isn’t one in the sixth either!There is some imagery that runs along with the credits which is fun to check out though.Full spoilers for the moviefollow!Final Destination: Bloodlines manages to have fun with the formula of the series, both sticking to the basic scenario fans expect – someone’s premonition of an impending terrible tragedy leads them to escape that tragedy alongside a group of others, only for Death itself to kill those who escaped it one by one in elaborate ways – while also introducing its own specifics that make it feel a bit different and fresh. Let’s break down the ending of the film and how it relates to the series as a whole…The Best Final Destination DeathsThe Set-UpIn Bloodlines, Iris, the woman who had the premonition of the collapse of the high-rise Skyview Restaurant Tower, did so way way back in 1968. And unlike in the previous films, where many still died in the actual disaster except the few people who left thanks to the premonition, in this situation, Iris saved all of the hundreds of people packing the restaurant that night, who were evacuated thanks to her warning. Slowly but surely, Death did come after them for escaping its grasp, except there were extenuating circumstances, since so many of these people went on to have children and sometimes grandchildren. So Death, always so tidy and persistent, has spent the last 57 years killing not only each survivor off but the entire bloodline that has resulted from each person, since by Death’s rules, they shouldn’t have existed in the first place.. Now, Death’s work on Project: Skyviewis nearly complete, and Iris’ family remains his big unfinished task – all of which starts to become clear to Iris’ granddaughter Stefaniwhen she begins having nightmares of Iris’ Skyview premonition, leading her to seek out the grandmother she’d never met, and who she was always told was crazy. PlayFinal Destination: Bloodlines Ending ExplainedA Reunion to Die ForStefani is initially skeptical of Iris’ story and the reason she now has spent years barricaded inside a house she’s attempted to death-proof to protect herself the best she can, even as she tells Stefani she now is dying from cancer and thus won’t be able to escape Death much longer. But when the still disbelieving Stefani goes outside to leave, Iris impulsively runs after her to ensure Stefani takes the book in which Iris has collected her findings on what happened to all those who survived Skyview and how to try to avoid literal Death traps - and decides to prove what she knows about Death’s plan by staying outside long enough for a weather vane to snap off and impale her in front of Stefani. Soon enough, with Iris dead, Death now goes after everyone else in the family, which includes Stefani’s brother and her estranged mother, plus her uncle and three cousins. And after Uncle Howardand his daughter Juliaboth go out in classic Final Destination scenarios involving a lawnmower and a garbage truck, the rest of the family is suddenly much more onboard with the claims of both Stefani and her mother Darlene- the latter of whom returns after years in self-exile because her own erratic behavior thanks to her mother’s “Death is everywhere” teachings had made her fear how she was raising her kids. Tony Todd’s Final Appearance: One Last Message From an IconMaking an emotional final appearance as his second most famous horror character after Candyman, the late, great Tony Todd – who passed away a few months after production wrapped on Bloodlines – returns as Final Destination regular William Bludworth, who Stefani and her family encounter at a hospital, learning he is the “JB” Iris referred to in her book. It turns out JB is a nickname his friends use, based off of his full name being William John Bludworth. It’s a fun way to suddenly add some personal touches to a character who was so enigmatic in his previous appearances that this is the first time since we met him 25 years ago that his name has been spoken out loud. Bludworth is only in the one scene, which was the norm for Todd’s role in this franchise, but it’s a big one for several reasons, effectively bidding a well-earned fond farewell to both the character and the man who played him. PlayBeyond his middle name and a nickname we didn’t know before, Bludworth reveals much more, including that he was the little boy who Iris tried to help in her premonition in 1968, in which the two of them died last in the tower collapse, making him the other last target Death has been seeking among those who survived the Skyview. Now though, like Iris did, he has terminal cancer and his time is nearly up once Iris’ family are all gone. Todd himself was sadly in the final stages of stomach cancer when he shot Final Destination: Bloodlines and the filmmakers have noted all involved understood the situation and why it was important to properly say goodbye to the character while, most importantly, giving Todd his due. As Bloodlines co-director Zach Lipovsky explained to IGN, “We’re really grateful that we had the ability to, from the beginning, design that experience for the audience with Tony and with all the writers and everybody. We knew he was ill for quite a while and he was extremely excited to be in the movie. He was very grateful for the ability to participate in the film and he was so joyful on set when he was there and he was cracking jokes and really excited to just have his ability to be in the film and give his character a lot more backstory. We give a lot of answers to who Bludworth is in the film, which is something that during the franchise, people have been clamoring for for a really long time. But we also knew that this was also going to be a goodbye of the character. And that's something that we worked very closely with him, to figure out really the best way of doing that, because these films are about death and his mortality was very present as we were working with him.” Bludworth tells Stefani and the others there are two known methods to actually cheat Death, in a moment that is rather exciting for longtime Final Destination fans in terms of acknowledging previous lore. First, as established in Final Destination 5, you can take the life of someone else - basically using that other person as a sacrifice, with you now getting the “credit” for the time your victim naturally had left to live, or even potentially some extra credit if they had decades and decades more to go before they would have died. But perhaps more importantly, because it’s the only way Bludworth knows of to save everyone still alive involved in a situation like this, is the cheat introduced in Final Destination 2 where clinically dying but then being resuscitated breaks Death’s chain completely. Which means if one of the family can pull this off, they can all be saved. But Bludworth says only one person has ever done this successfully. He had this sort of mischievous smile, even when he delivers that line and then says, ‘Good luck.’ -Co-director Zach Lipovsky on shooting Tony Todd's final scene“Todd’s scene ends with Bludworth revealing that he is going to retire and enjoy the time he has left and then his final words get notably poignant for a Final Destination film - something Lipovsky credits fully to Todd. “One of the unique opportunities that came up was that near the end of that scene, we asked him to actually throw away the script for a moment and just speak from the heart as to everything that he was thinking about as far as what the movie was about, what the franchise has been about, but also just what life's about and what is it all about in the end. And the take that's in the film where he says, ‘Life is precious. Cherish every second because you never know when…’ And the earnestness that he says that with all came in the moment from him. And I think you really feel that when you watch the movie that he's obviously speaking as a character who knows that their death is coming, but he's also speaking as an actor who's speaking to the audience as far as what's important in life. And that was a really powerful moment on set when we filmed that with him.” Not surprisingly, it was a highly emotional day on set when Todd shot his scene, but Lipovsky loves how Todd’s actual final words of “Good luck” to the other charactersand how he delivers them let him also meld the actor and Bludworth together further.“He had this sort of mischievous smile, even when he delivers that line and then says, ‘Good luck’ in the way that he has – that sort of dark, mischievous way as he goes out the door – he knew exactly what he was doing and he relished.” Final Destination: Bloodline GalleryFarewell to the Family While still at the hospital, Stefani’s cousins Erikand Bobbyare the next to go. Technically, Erik wasn’t on Death’s list because he doesn’t share Iris’ bloodline – he’s shocked to discover he was the result of an affair his mother Brendahad – but he gets taken out too when he attempts to break the chain by “killing” his brother using Bobby’s peanut allergy before rushing him to the ER to be revived. However, an errant, Death-controlled MRI machine acting like it’s Magneto on a rampage pulls the piercing-laden Erik towards it, who is then snapped in half when a wheelchair shoves him into the MRI machine in a very unrecommended manner - and then Bobby is stabbed by a projectile-powered spring from a vending machine, which drills into his head. With Uncle Howard’s side of the family all gone, it’s just Stefani and her brother Charlieand Darlene left. Given all Iris did to keep it safe for herself inside, they decide to go to Iris’ abandoned cabin, with Darlene intending to now live the isolated life her mother did - because if Death can’t get to her, it can’t move on to her kids. But when they arrive, Death does its best to keep them out, with the RV crashing and Stefani submerged in water as a result, while the house itself gets set on fire and explodes. Darlene is then killed when a post falls onto her but Charlie gets to his sister, who has seemingly drowned, and performs CPR on her. He is able to save her, and in the process, seems to have finally stopped Death from continuing to hunt them. The siblings laugh, thinking they’ve escaped - before one of the train cars suddenly pivots, sending huge logs flying which crush and kill Stefani and Charlie.“Sometime later, Charlie is getting ready for prom night alongside his dad and sister and it’s mentioned to his date’s father, who’s a doctor, how Charlie brought Stefani back from the dead. However, the doctor then tells them that, considering how quickly Stefani was revived, she was unconscious but never actually clinically dead… which means Death was never truly thwarted.And that’s when a train passing by crashes and derails, skidding through the street and seemingly aiming right for Stefani and Charlie, who desperately try to outrun it. It comes to a stop and the siblings laugh, thinking they’ve escaped - before one of the train cars suddenly pivots on its side, sending huge logs it was carrying flying through the air, which crush and kill Stefani and Charlie, in a callback to one of the franchise’s most famous and most meme’d moments. Does Final Destination Bloodlines Have a Mid- or Post-Credit Scene?Not really, but there are some visuals accompanying the closing credits that focus on articles Iris had collected in her book about various notable deaths through the years, intercut with quick footage from some of those tragedies - before we end on the newest article, reporting on Stefani and Charlie’s bizarre death. PlayBut Does Bloodlines Set Up Final Destination 7 in Any Way?The sixth Final Destination movie doesn’t really offer any set-up for a seventh installment… unless it does? This is a franchise that has never been about heavy serialization. Only the second movie was truly a direct sequel with explicit plot threads to the movie that preceded it, including a prominent returning character in the form of Ali Larter’s Clear Rivers. But following that film – and Clear dying in it – the series consisted of nearly entirely standalone stories that introduced a brand new group of characters each time, with the exception of a possible William Bludworth scene. And having new characters made sense, because Final Destination 3, 4 and 5, as with Bloodlines now, also made sure there were zero survivors among their crop of new Death targets. Along with Bludworth, the only real recurring element beyond the core concept was that the strange occurrences of the first film’s Flight 180 explosion and the ill-fated group who initially escaped that scenario were at least somewhat well known and would usually be brought up at some point, but even then, usually in a nebulous manner.To have Final Destination 2's Kimberly brought up makes it hard not to wonder if there might be plans for her going forward as someone with important information for those wishing to stop Death.“All of which is to say that it really stands out in Final Destination: Bloodlines when Bludworth, while explaining how you can actually cheat Death – and talking about the only person who did it – says the name Kimberly Corman. Played by AJ Cook, Kimberly Corman was the main character in 2003’s Final Destination 2, and following multiple mentions in Bloodlines of the “survivor” Iris wrote about “JB” finding in her book, Bludworth specifically mentions Kimberly as the one and only person who’s ever fully cheated Death without it coming back around on her. In Final Destination 2’s conclusion, Kimberly purposely drove into a lake and drowned and was truly clinically dead briefly before a doctor resuscitated her.Longtime mega-fans of the series may recall that the Final Destination 3 DVD had a “Choose Their Fate” interactive special feature where you could see alternate scenarios from what occurred in the film. And in one of them, a headline did report on Kimberly and Burke’s eventual deaths. But that version of the story was never canon and now Bludworth’s information in Bloodlines confirms Kimberly’s method really and truly worked and she’s still alive. It’s been 22 years since we’ve seen Kimberly or Burke but to have Kimberly’s name suddenly brought up in this manner makes it hard not to wonder if there might be plans for her going forward as someone with important information for those wishing to stop Death in the future - especially given that, with Bludworth no longer an option, this series is probably in need of a new Person Who Knows Things for the newbies to go to, given sticking only to internet searches for your characters just isn’t cinematically exciting. And look, AJ Cook’s been plenty busy for the past couple of decades as a cast member on Criminal Minds, but maybe she can still take a break to go deal with Death once again. Of course, there’s also Iris’ book and all of the information she’s gathered as a notable remaining element, and it does stand out that Stefani’s father Martyand Aunt Brenda are both alive at the end of the film, thanks to not being part of Iris’ bloodline. Could either one of them or Iris’ book play a role in the future, at least as far as briefly appearing to pass on what they know? We’ll have to see what Death’s – and the Final Destination producers’ – design is.What did you think of Bloodlines? Let’s discuss in the comments!Note: This story was updated with full spoilers on May 16, 2025. #final #destination #bloodlines #ending #explained
    WWW.IGN.COM
    Final Destination: Bloodlines Ending Explained - Does It Set Up Final Destination 7?
    Let's make this simple: You want to know if there are any post- or mid-credits scenes in Final Destination: Bloodlines. The answer is no. There weren't any credits scenes in the first five movies and there isn’t one in the sixth either!There is some imagery that runs along with the credits which is fun to check out though.Full spoilers for the movie (and the entire Final Destination series so far) follow!Final Destination: Bloodlines manages to have fun with the formula of the series, both sticking to the basic scenario fans expect – someone’s premonition of an impending terrible tragedy leads them to escape that tragedy alongside a group of others, only for Death itself to kill those who escaped it one by one in elaborate ways – while also introducing its own specifics that make it feel a bit different and fresh. Let’s break down the ending of the film and how it relates to the series as a whole…The Best Final Destination DeathsThe Set-UpIn Bloodlines, Iris (played by Gabrielle Rose in the present and Brec Bassinger in the past), the woman who had the premonition of the collapse of the high-rise Skyview Restaurant Tower, did so way way back in 1968. And unlike in the previous films, where many still died in the actual disaster except the few people who left thanks to the premonition, in this situation, Iris saved all of the hundreds of people packing the restaurant that night, who were evacuated thanks to her warning. Slowly but surely, Death did come after them for escaping its grasp, except there were extenuating circumstances, since so many of these people went on to have children and sometimes grandchildren. So Death, always so tidy and persistent, has spent the last 57 years killing not only each survivor off but the entire bloodline that has resulted from each person, since by Death’s rules, they shouldn’t have existed in the first place.. Now, Death’s work on Project: Skyview (our term, not Death’s) is nearly complete, and Iris’ family remains his big unfinished task – all of which starts to become clear to Iris’ granddaughter Stefani (Kaitlyn Santa Juana) when she begins having nightmares of Iris’ Skyview premonition, leading her to seek out the grandmother she’d never met, and who she was always told was crazy. PlayFinal Destination: Bloodlines Ending ExplainedA Reunion to Die ForStefani is initially skeptical of Iris’ story and the reason she now has spent years barricaded inside a house she’s attempted to death-proof to protect herself the best she can, even as she tells Stefani she now is dying from cancer and thus won’t be able to escape Death much longer. But when the still disbelieving Stefani goes outside to leave, Iris impulsively runs after her to ensure Stefani takes the book in which Iris has collected her findings on what happened to all those who survived Skyview and how to try to avoid literal Death traps - and decides to prove what she knows about Death’s plan by staying outside long enough for a weather vane to snap off and impale her in front of Stefani. Soon enough, with Iris dead, Death now goes after everyone else in the family, which includes Stefani’s brother and her estranged mother, plus her uncle and three cousins (anyone who married into the family, like Stefani’s father or her aunt are safe, since they would have existed regardless of Skyview). And after Uncle Howard (Alex Zahara) and his daughter Julia (Anna Lore) both go out in classic Final Destination scenarios involving a lawnmower and a garbage truck, the rest of the family is suddenly much more onboard with the claims of both Stefani and her mother Darlene (Rya Kihlstedt) - the latter of whom returns after years in self-exile because her own erratic behavior thanks to her mother’s “Death is everywhere” teachings had made her fear how she was raising her kids. Tony Todd’s Final Appearance: One Last Message From an IconMaking an emotional final appearance as his second most famous horror character after Candyman, the late, great Tony Todd – who passed away a few months after production wrapped on Bloodlines – returns as Final Destination regular William Bludworth, who Stefani and her family encounter at a hospital, learning he is the “JB” Iris referred to in her book. It turns out JB is a nickname his friends use, based off of his full name being William John Bludworth. It’s a fun way to suddenly add some personal touches to a character who was so enigmatic in his previous appearances that this is the first time since we met him 25 years ago that his name has been spoken out loud. Bludworth is only in the one scene, which was the norm for Todd’s role in this franchise, but it’s a big one for several reasons, effectively bidding a well-earned fond farewell to both the character and the man who played him. PlayBeyond his middle name and a nickname we didn’t know before, Bludworth reveals much more, including that he was the little boy who Iris tried to help in her premonition in 1968, in which the two of them died last in the tower collapse, making him the other last target Death has been seeking among those who survived the Skyview. Now though, like Iris did, he has terminal cancer and his time is nearly up once Iris’ family are all gone. Todd himself was sadly in the final stages of stomach cancer when he shot Final Destination: Bloodlines and the filmmakers have noted all involved understood the situation and why it was important to properly say goodbye to the character while, most importantly, giving Todd his due. As Bloodlines co-director Zach Lipovsky explained to IGN, “We’re really grateful that we had the ability to, from the beginning, design that experience for the audience with Tony and with all the writers and everybody. We knew he was ill for quite a while and he was extremely excited to be in the movie. He was very grateful for the ability to participate in the film and he was so joyful on set when he was there and he was cracking jokes and really excited to just have his ability to be in the film and give his character a lot more backstory. We give a lot of answers to who Bludworth is in the film, which is something that during the franchise, people have been clamoring for for a really long time. But we also knew that this was also going to be a goodbye of the character. And that's something that we worked very closely with him, to figure out really the best way of doing that, because these films are about death and his mortality was very present as we were working with him.” Bludworth tells Stefani and the others there are two known methods to actually cheat Death, in a moment that is rather exciting for longtime Final Destination fans in terms of acknowledging previous lore. First, as established in Final Destination 5, you can take the life of someone else - basically using that other person as a sacrifice, with you now getting the “credit” for the time your victim naturally had left to live, or even potentially some extra credit if they had decades and decades more to go before they would have died. But perhaps more importantly, because it’s the only way Bludworth knows of to save everyone still alive involved in a situation like this, is the cheat introduced in Final Destination 2 where clinically dying but then being resuscitated breaks Death’s chain completely. Which means if one of the family can pull this off, they can all be saved. But Bludworth says only one person has ever done this successfully (more on that below). He had this sort of mischievous smile, even when he delivers that line and then says, ‘Good luck.’ -Co-director Zach Lipovsky on shooting Tony Todd's final scene“Todd’s scene ends with Bludworth revealing that he is going to retire and enjoy the time he has left and then his final words get notably poignant for a Final Destination film - something Lipovsky credits fully to Todd. “One of the unique opportunities that came up was that near the end of that scene, we asked him to actually throw away the script for a moment and just speak from the heart as to everything that he was thinking about as far as what the movie was about, what the franchise has been about, but also just what life's about and what is it all about in the end. And the take that's in the film where he says, ‘Life is precious. Cherish every second because you never know when…’ And the earnestness that he says that with all came in the moment from him. And I think you really feel that when you watch the movie that he's obviously speaking as a character who knows that their death is coming, but he's also speaking as an actor who's speaking to the audience as far as what's important in life. And that was a really powerful moment on set when we filmed that with him.” Not surprisingly, it was a highly emotional day on set when Todd shot his scene, but Lipovsky loves how Todd’s actual final words of “Good luck” to the other characters (and, essentially, to the audience) and how he delivers them let him also meld the actor and Bludworth together further.“He had this sort of mischievous smile, even when he delivers that line and then says, ‘Good luck’ in the way that he has – that sort of dark, mischievous way as he goes out the door – he knew exactly what he was doing and he relished [it].” Final Destination: Bloodline GalleryFarewell to the Family While still at the hospital, Stefani’s cousins Erik (Richard Harmon) and Bobby (Owen Patrick Joyner) are the next to go. Technically, Erik wasn’t on Death’s list because he doesn’t share Iris’ bloodline – he’s shocked to discover he was the result of an affair his mother Brenda (April Telek) had – but he gets taken out too when he attempts to break the chain by “killing” his brother using Bobby’s peanut allergy before rushing him to the ER to be revived. However, an errant, Death-controlled MRI machine acting like it’s Magneto on a rampage pulls the piercing-laden Erik towards it, who is then snapped in half when a wheelchair shoves him into the MRI machine in a very unrecommended manner - and then Bobby is stabbed by a projectile-powered spring from a vending machine, which drills into his head. With Uncle Howard’s side of the family all gone, it’s just Stefani and her brother Charlie (Tio Briones) and Darlene left. Given all Iris did to keep it safe for herself inside, they decide to go to Iris’ abandoned cabin, with Darlene intending to now live the isolated life her mother did - because if Death can’t get to her, it can’t move on to her kids. But when they arrive, Death does its best to keep them out, with the RV crashing and Stefani submerged in water as a result, while the house itself gets set on fire and explodes. Darlene is then killed when a post falls onto her but Charlie gets to his sister, who has seemingly drowned, and performs CPR on her. He is able to save her, and in the process, seems to have finally stopped Death from continuing to hunt them. The siblings laugh, thinking they’ve escaped - before one of the train cars suddenly pivots, sending huge logs flying which crush and kill Stefani and Charlie.“Sometime later, Charlie is getting ready for prom night alongside his dad and sister and it’s mentioned to his date’s father, who’s a doctor, how Charlie brought Stefani back from the dead. However, the doctor then tells them that, considering how quickly Stefani was revived, she was unconscious but never actually clinically dead… which means Death was never truly thwarted.And that’s when a train passing by crashes and derails, skidding through the street and seemingly aiming right for Stefani and Charlie, who desperately try to outrun it. It comes to a stop and the siblings laugh, thinking they’ve escaped - before one of the train cars suddenly pivots on its side, sending huge logs it was carrying flying through the air, which crush and kill Stefani and Charlie, in a callback to one of the franchise’s most famous and most meme’d moments (from Final Destination 2). Does Final Destination Bloodlines Have a Mid- or Post-Credit Scene?Not really, but there are some visuals accompanying the closing credits that focus on articles Iris had collected in her book about various notable deaths through the years, intercut with quick footage from some of those tragedies - before we end on the newest article, reporting on Stefani and Charlie’s bizarre death. PlayBut Does Bloodlines Set Up Final Destination 7 in Any Way?The sixth Final Destination movie doesn’t really offer any set-up for a seventh installment… unless it does? This is a franchise that has never been about heavy serialization. Only the second movie was truly a direct sequel with explicit plot threads to the movie that preceded it, including a prominent returning character in the form of Ali Larter’s Clear Rivers. But following that film – and Clear dying in it – the series consisted of nearly entirely standalone stories that introduced a brand new group of characters each time, with the exception of a possible William Bludworth scene (he wasn’t in Final Destination 3 or 4, though Tony Todd made an audio cameo in FD3). And having new characters made sense, because Final Destination 3, 4 and 5, as with Bloodlines now, also made sure there were zero survivors among their crop of new Death targets. Along with Bludworth, the only real recurring element beyond the core concept was that the strange occurrences of the first film’s Flight 180 explosion and the ill-fated group who initially escaped that scenario were at least somewhat well known and would usually be brought up at some point, but even then, usually in a nebulous manner. (Though Final Destination 5 of course skipped a Flight 180 mention in order to mask its very fun Secret Prequel status, with that film’s ending looping back into the original movie in a thrilling manner.)To have Final Destination 2's Kimberly brought up makes it hard not to wonder if there might be plans for her going forward as someone with important information for those wishing to stop Death.“All of which is to say that it really stands out in Final Destination: Bloodlines when Bludworth, while explaining how you can actually cheat Death – and talking about the only person who did it – says the name Kimberly Corman. Played by AJ Cook, Kimberly Corman was the main character in 2003’s Final Destination 2, and following multiple mentions in Bloodlines of the “survivor” Iris wrote about “JB” finding in her book, Bludworth specifically mentions Kimberly as the one and only person who’s ever fully cheated Death without it coming back around on her. In Final Destination 2’s conclusion, Kimberly purposely drove into a lake and drowned and was truly clinically dead briefly before a doctor resuscitated her. (It’s worth noting that Kimberly’s actions also saved her friend, Thomas Burke, who would have died after her, but we’ll just assume Bludworth didn’t want to complicate matters and stuck to discussing the person whose actual decision affected the outcome.)Longtime mega-fans of the series may recall that the Final Destination 3 DVD had a “Choose Their Fate” interactive special feature where you could see alternate scenarios from what occurred in the film. And in one of them, a headline did report on Kimberly and Burke’s eventual deaths. But that version of the story was never canon and now Bludworth’s information in Bloodlines confirms Kimberly’s method really and truly worked and she’s still alive. It’s been 22 years since we’ve seen Kimberly or Burke but to have Kimberly’s name suddenly brought up in this manner makes it hard not to wonder if there might be plans for her going forward as someone with important information for those wishing to stop Death in the future - especially given that, with Bludworth no longer an option, this series is probably in need of a new Person Who Knows Things for the newbies to go to, given sticking only to internet searches for your characters just isn’t cinematically exciting. And look, AJ Cook’s been plenty busy for the past couple of decades as a cast member on Criminal Minds, but maybe she can still take a break to go deal with Death once again. Of course, there’s also Iris’ book and all of the information she’s gathered as a notable remaining element, and it does stand out that Stefani’s father Marty (Tinpo Lee) and Aunt Brenda are both alive at the end of the film, thanks to not being part of Iris’ bloodline. Could either one of them or Iris’ book play a role in the future, at least as far as briefly appearing to pass on what they know? We’ll have to see what Death’s – and the Final Destination producers’ – design is.What did you think of Bloodlines? Let’s discuss in the comments!Note: This story was updated with full spoilers on May 16, 2025.
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  • Rapid design iteration in Breachers using AssetPostprocessor and Blender

    Triangle Factory is a fast-growing Belgian gaming company that uses Unity to create high-quality multiplayer VR titles like Hyper Dash and their latest game, Breachers. Triangle Factory leverages tools like Cinemachine, Unity Profiler, Game Server Hosting, Matchmaker, Voice Chat, and Friends in creating an immersive experience for players.

    In this blog, Jel Sadones, lead level design/tech art, and lead developer Pieter Vantorre walk us through their Blender-to-Unity pipeline and how they brought their VR tactical FPS title Breachers to life.Unity has been our go-to engine and development environment for over a decade, and we have gone through many workflows over the years for environment modeling and design. That includes using in-engine modeling tools like ProBuilderand assembling scenes from Prefabs created in other modeling packages. For our current projects though, we’ve landed on a workflow where we model and organize our levels in Blender, and rely on Unity’s AssetPostprocessor to integrate them into our Unity project.In this article, we’ll share with you how we ended up with this workflow and how it supports the kind of rapid design iteration we need for our games.In 2021, we released our first big VR title, Hyper Dash, a fast-paced 5v5 arena shooter. When we started development on the game in 2019, we had a basic Blender-to-Unity workflow that probably looks familiar to many: We simply modeled geometry in Blender, exported our assets as FBX files and manually integrated them into Unity. The manual integration involved several steps:Setting up dynamic objects in the scene such as weapon pickups, spawn doors, capture pointsPlacing colliders to prevent players from walking or teleporting in certain areasSetting up invisible guides to allow bots to behave properlyEtc.This process can work well for smaller projects, but quickly becomes cumbersome as a project scales and evolves. When we started planning the development of our next title, we knew we were going to need a drastically improved workflow.Breachers is a competitive shooter with complex level layouts, subtler gameplay mechanics, more technical systems at play, and a higher level of graphical polish targeting the newest generation of standalone VR hardware. In terms of complexity, it goes several steps further than Hyper Dash, and we quickly felt the effects of this on our workflow.In the prototyping phase, we still relied heavily on Prefabs for dynamic objects, like window barricades for example. These are objects that we place inside window frames to block line of sight between interiors and the outside to prevent teams from seeing each other during the warm-up phase of the game.While testing our prototype, we were constantly moving around windows to improve gameplay, which meant changing geometry in Blender and re-exporting to Unity and then manually moving the barricade objects to match our changes. Many hours were spent flying around Unity’s Scene view, manually checking and fixing these kinds of things. Still, we had more than one playtest where we only noticed during gameplay that something had been overlooked.Obviously, this workflow was not going to give us the ability to quickly iterate on our map designs as we playtested, both internally and as part of our open alpha, where we planned to make one map available for free to get feedback from the community. We were looking forward to all that feedback, but not looking forward at all to the manual effort involved in applying it to our maps.Another potential downside to a Prefab-based design workflow is performance. We mainly target mobile, standalone VR headsets for our games. We want to push the visuals as far as we can, so we need to squeeze every last drop of performance out of our workflow.Assembling levels from Prefabs can be less efficient than creating a watertight mesh in a modeling program. If you snap two modular wall pieces together, you always have an unmerged loop of geometry in between them. With Prefabs, it’s also easy to end up placing a lot of geometry in your scene that isn’t visiblebut still taking up valuable lightmap space. Over an entire level, those small inefficiencies can add up to wasted performance and diminished visuals.The final issue with Prefabs we want to mention is that it can be easy to break things by applying seemingly innocent changes to the source model in Blender, like renaming an object. As a game or level evolves, you often want to reorganize your assets and give them improved or more consistent names. But renaming an object in Blender and re-exporting it can easilybreak the overrides and additions made to the object in Unity, leading to regressions.In this simplified example, we have a ventilation grate Prefab and want smoke coming out of it. After importing the mesh into Unity, our artist has added the smoke particle system as a child object and added a surface type component to the Prefab to mark it as being a metal object.Here you can see what happens if we rename our mesh in Blender:When reimporting the mesh with the updated name, Unity can no longer find the old mesh by name, so it removes the object from the model Prefab. Children of this removed object are moved to the root of the Prefab and existing scripts are removed, again leading to manual cleanup work we’d rather avoid.As the prototyping phase for Breachers wrapped up and we prepared to go into full production mode in early 2022, our art and dev teams sat down together and investigated what we could do to remedy these problems. We defined clear goals for our ideal asset pipeline, one that would support the rapid and flexible iteration required for Breachers:All creation and modification of level geometry should happen in Blender.WYSIWYG: What a designer creates in Blender should match the result in Unity as closely as possible.When something is updated in Blender, importing the changes into Unity should happen automatically and not require any manual effort.As mentioned above, our main goal was to have an accurate visualization of the game in Blender – not only properly reflecting how the end result will look in Unity but also how the gameplay mechanics are set up. Gameplay in Breachers not only depends on a level’s layout, but also on dynamic objectsand invisible elements. We want to have all this information visible at the design stage and carried over precisely to Unity.Custom properties are critical to our workflow, and we assign these to objects in Blender. These are then carried over in Unity by the FBX format, so we can read them and run custom logic when our assets are imported into Unity.This gives us a great amount of flexibility, as well as stability. These properties stay connected to objects throughout the pipeline, so we can reorganize and rename things in our levels as much as we want without worrying about things breaking or getting out of sync.Unity has a powerful class called AssetPostprocessor, which allows modifications of assets while they are being imported. This is what we use at import time to parse those custom properties and act on them.Prefab linksWe have a custom property named PrefabLink, which tells Unity the object imported from Blender should be replaced by a Prefab already in the Unity project, while preserving the imported model’s transform. This allows us to place these dynamic objects in Blender while retaining the advantages of Prefabs once they are imported into Unity. The window barricades in the Blender scene above are a good example of this.Surface typesSurface definition is extremely important in Breachers. Walking on a metal staircase sounds different from walking on a concrete floor. Bullet penetration through wood is a lot different than through steel. And each surface type has its own impact effects. Going over each prop in Unity and tagging it as the correct surface type would be extremely time consuming, so we also tackle this at the design stage in Blender by setting custom properties on our geometry colliders.Static flagsAnother important setting for optimization are Unity’s static flags. Setting these correctly can have a profound impact on things like visibility culling, light baking, and batching. Using custom properties in Blender, we can set these on any part of the level, including reusable props, and have that information carry over into Unity across our levels.CollidersLastly, we’d like to share how we set up colliders. Unity has a simple but effective system that automatically detects level-of-detail variants for models when you postfix a model asset name with _LOD0, _LOD1, etc. We were inspired by this and created a similar system for colliders: By simply having geometry with _BoxCollider or _NoCollision in the name, we replace the meshes from Blender with colliders in Unity.As a concrete example, here is a snippet of our LevelSetupPostprocessor that reads custom properties and assigns the right static flags on each imported object:For all of this to work smoothly, we did have to do some work on the Blender side as well.Custom properties are a bit hidden in Blender’s UI and would require artists to manually type out the custom properties each time, which is not a great user experience. Relying on manual text entry would also be very error-prone, undoing much of the advantage of setting things up in Blender in the first place. Moving from a Prefab-based workflow into Blender also made us miss some of the advantages of Prefabs, like having a nice library of objects to browse through and pick from. Luckily, Blender, like Unity, is very flexible and easily extensible.The answer to the Prefab organization problem came in Blender 3.2 with Asset Libraries. This system acts a bit like the Prefab system in Unity: It allows you to create assets in a separate file and then import those into your Blender scene, while changes in the asset file reflect automatically in the Blender scene. Additionally, it ensures that any custom properties or colliders are correctly applied to each instance of this asset in Blender.For Blender, we wrote an in-house add-on to help set up the custom properties in a more clear user interface. This simplifies setting custom properties by just selecting the relevant Blender objects and hitting a button, instead of typing out each property manually.The Bundle Exporter add-on is an open source add-on that we’re using to export all of our FBX files in one click. We modified it to also work with custom properties and updated the UI to have faster exports for our specific needs.Setting up our level design workflow for Breachers took a large time investment initially, but we believe it was the right choice for the project. Also, it was kind of fun!As we’ve built out the game from initial blockouts through alpha testing and the months leading up to the final release, iterating on our levels has been quick and painless. We’ve been able to eliminate overhead and busywork for our designers and artists, while also transferring responsibilities to them that they previously would have needed a developer for.We have been impressed at both Unity and Blender for their ability to integrate with each other this smoothly, and we strongly believe this integration was critical to making Breachers a game we’re happy with and proud to share with the world.Thanks for reading, and enjoy the game!Triangle Factory’s Breachers is now available. Check out more blogs from Made with Unity developers here.
    #rapid #design #iteration #breachers #using
    Rapid design iteration in Breachers using AssetPostprocessor and Blender
    Triangle Factory is a fast-growing Belgian gaming company that uses Unity to create high-quality multiplayer VR titles like Hyper Dash and their latest game, Breachers. Triangle Factory leverages tools like Cinemachine, Unity Profiler, Game Server Hosting, Matchmaker, Voice Chat, and Friends in creating an immersive experience for players. In this blog, Jel Sadones, lead level design/tech art, and lead developer Pieter Vantorre walk us through their Blender-to-Unity pipeline and how they brought their VR tactical FPS title Breachers to life.Unity has been our go-to engine and development environment for over a decade, and we have gone through many workflows over the years for environment modeling and design. That includes using in-engine modeling tools like ProBuilderand assembling scenes from Prefabs created in other modeling packages. For our current projects though, we’ve landed on a workflow where we model and organize our levels in Blender, and rely on Unity’s AssetPostprocessor to integrate them into our Unity project.In this article, we’ll share with you how we ended up with this workflow and how it supports the kind of rapid design iteration we need for our games.In 2021, we released our first big VR title, Hyper Dash, a fast-paced 5v5 arena shooter. When we started development on the game in 2019, we had a basic Blender-to-Unity workflow that probably looks familiar to many: We simply modeled geometry in Blender, exported our assets as FBX files and manually integrated them into Unity. The manual integration involved several steps:Setting up dynamic objects in the scene such as weapon pickups, spawn doors, capture pointsPlacing colliders to prevent players from walking or teleporting in certain areasSetting up invisible guides to allow bots to behave properlyEtc.This process can work well for smaller projects, but quickly becomes cumbersome as a project scales and evolves. When we started planning the development of our next title, we knew we were going to need a drastically improved workflow.Breachers is a competitive shooter with complex level layouts, subtler gameplay mechanics, more technical systems at play, and a higher level of graphical polish targeting the newest generation of standalone VR hardware. In terms of complexity, it goes several steps further than Hyper Dash, and we quickly felt the effects of this on our workflow.In the prototyping phase, we still relied heavily on Prefabs for dynamic objects, like window barricades for example. These are objects that we place inside window frames to block line of sight between interiors and the outside to prevent teams from seeing each other during the warm-up phase of the game.While testing our prototype, we were constantly moving around windows to improve gameplay, which meant changing geometry in Blender and re-exporting to Unity and then manually moving the barricade objects to match our changes. Many hours were spent flying around Unity’s Scene view, manually checking and fixing these kinds of things. Still, we had more than one playtest where we only noticed during gameplay that something had been overlooked.Obviously, this workflow was not going to give us the ability to quickly iterate on our map designs as we playtested, both internally and as part of our open alpha, where we planned to make one map available for free to get feedback from the community. We were looking forward to all that feedback, but not looking forward at all to the manual effort involved in applying it to our maps.Another potential downside to a Prefab-based design workflow is performance. We mainly target mobile, standalone VR headsets for our games. We want to push the visuals as far as we can, so we need to squeeze every last drop of performance out of our workflow.Assembling levels from Prefabs can be less efficient than creating a watertight mesh in a modeling program. If you snap two modular wall pieces together, you always have an unmerged loop of geometry in between them. With Prefabs, it’s also easy to end up placing a lot of geometry in your scene that isn’t visiblebut still taking up valuable lightmap space. Over an entire level, those small inefficiencies can add up to wasted performance and diminished visuals.The final issue with Prefabs we want to mention is that it can be easy to break things by applying seemingly innocent changes to the source model in Blender, like renaming an object. As a game or level evolves, you often want to reorganize your assets and give them improved or more consistent names. But renaming an object in Blender and re-exporting it can easilybreak the overrides and additions made to the object in Unity, leading to regressions.In this simplified example, we have a ventilation grate Prefab and want smoke coming out of it. After importing the mesh into Unity, our artist has added the smoke particle system as a child object and added a surface type component to the Prefab to mark it as being a metal object.Here you can see what happens if we rename our mesh in Blender:When reimporting the mesh with the updated name, Unity can no longer find the old mesh by name, so it removes the object from the model Prefab. Children of this removed object are moved to the root of the Prefab and existing scripts are removed, again leading to manual cleanup work we’d rather avoid.As the prototyping phase for Breachers wrapped up and we prepared to go into full production mode in early 2022, our art and dev teams sat down together and investigated what we could do to remedy these problems. We defined clear goals for our ideal asset pipeline, one that would support the rapid and flexible iteration required for Breachers:All creation and modification of level geometry should happen in Blender.WYSIWYG: What a designer creates in Blender should match the result in Unity as closely as possible.When something is updated in Blender, importing the changes into Unity should happen automatically and not require any manual effort.As mentioned above, our main goal was to have an accurate visualization of the game in Blender – not only properly reflecting how the end result will look in Unity but also how the gameplay mechanics are set up. Gameplay in Breachers not only depends on a level’s layout, but also on dynamic objectsand invisible elements. We want to have all this information visible at the design stage and carried over precisely to Unity.Custom properties are critical to our workflow, and we assign these to objects in Blender. These are then carried over in Unity by the FBX format, so we can read them and run custom logic when our assets are imported into Unity.This gives us a great amount of flexibility, as well as stability. These properties stay connected to objects throughout the pipeline, so we can reorganize and rename things in our levels as much as we want without worrying about things breaking or getting out of sync.Unity has a powerful class called AssetPostprocessor, which allows modifications of assets while they are being imported. This is what we use at import time to parse those custom properties and act on them.Prefab linksWe have a custom property named PrefabLink, which tells Unity the object imported from Blender should be replaced by a Prefab already in the Unity project, while preserving the imported model’s transform. This allows us to place these dynamic objects in Blender while retaining the advantages of Prefabs once they are imported into Unity. The window barricades in the Blender scene above are a good example of this.Surface typesSurface definition is extremely important in Breachers. Walking on a metal staircase sounds different from walking on a concrete floor. Bullet penetration through wood is a lot different than through steel. And each surface type has its own impact effects. Going over each prop in Unity and tagging it as the correct surface type would be extremely time consuming, so we also tackle this at the design stage in Blender by setting custom properties on our geometry colliders.Static flagsAnother important setting for optimization are Unity’s static flags. Setting these correctly can have a profound impact on things like visibility culling, light baking, and batching. Using custom properties in Blender, we can set these on any part of the level, including reusable props, and have that information carry over into Unity across our levels.CollidersLastly, we’d like to share how we set up colliders. Unity has a simple but effective system that automatically detects level-of-detail variants for models when you postfix a model asset name with _LOD0, _LOD1, etc. We were inspired by this and created a similar system for colliders: By simply having geometry with _BoxCollider or _NoCollision in the name, we replace the meshes from Blender with colliders in Unity.As a concrete example, here is a snippet of our LevelSetupPostprocessor that reads custom properties and assigns the right static flags on each imported object:For all of this to work smoothly, we did have to do some work on the Blender side as well.Custom properties are a bit hidden in Blender’s UI and would require artists to manually type out the custom properties each time, which is not a great user experience. Relying on manual text entry would also be very error-prone, undoing much of the advantage of setting things up in Blender in the first place. Moving from a Prefab-based workflow into Blender also made us miss some of the advantages of Prefabs, like having a nice library of objects to browse through and pick from. Luckily, Blender, like Unity, is very flexible and easily extensible.The answer to the Prefab organization problem came in Blender 3.2 with Asset Libraries. This system acts a bit like the Prefab system in Unity: It allows you to create assets in a separate file and then import those into your Blender scene, while changes in the asset file reflect automatically in the Blender scene. Additionally, it ensures that any custom properties or colliders are correctly applied to each instance of this asset in Blender.For Blender, we wrote an in-house add-on to help set up the custom properties in a more clear user interface. This simplifies setting custom properties by just selecting the relevant Blender objects and hitting a button, instead of typing out each property manually.The Bundle Exporter add-on is an open source add-on that we’re using to export all of our FBX files in one click. We modified it to also work with custom properties and updated the UI to have faster exports for our specific needs.Setting up our level design workflow for Breachers took a large time investment initially, but we believe it was the right choice for the project. Also, it was kind of fun!As we’ve built out the game from initial blockouts through alpha testing and the months leading up to the final release, iterating on our levels has been quick and painless. We’ve been able to eliminate overhead and busywork for our designers and artists, while also transferring responsibilities to them that they previously would have needed a developer for.We have been impressed at both Unity and Blender for their ability to integrate with each other this smoothly, and we strongly believe this integration was critical to making Breachers a game we’re happy with and proud to share with the world.Thanks for reading, and enjoy the game!Triangle Factory’s Breachers is now available. Check out more blogs from Made with Unity developers here. #rapid #design #iteration #breachers #using
    UNITY.COM
    Rapid design iteration in Breachers using AssetPostprocessor and Blender
    Triangle Factory is a fast-growing Belgian gaming company that uses Unity to create high-quality multiplayer VR titles like Hyper Dash and their latest game, Breachers. Triangle Factory leverages tools like Cinemachine, Unity Profiler, Game Server Hosting, Matchmaker, Voice Chat (Vivox), and Friends in creating an immersive experience for players. In this blog, Jel Sadones, lead level design/tech art, and lead developer Pieter Vantorre walk us through their Blender-to-Unity pipeline and how they brought their VR tactical FPS title Breachers to life.Unity has been our go-to engine and development environment for over a decade, and we have gone through many workflows over the years for environment modeling and design. That includes using in-engine modeling tools like ProBuilder (which we still use and love for rapid prototyping) and assembling scenes from Prefabs created in other modeling packages. For our current projects though, we’ve landed on a workflow where we model and organize our levels in Blender, and rely on Unity’s AssetPostprocessor to integrate them into our Unity project.In this article, we’ll share with you how we ended up with this workflow and how it supports the kind of rapid design iteration we need for our games.In 2021, we released our first big VR title, Hyper Dash, a fast-paced 5v5 arena shooter. When we started development on the game in 2019, we had a basic Blender-to-Unity workflow that probably looks familiar to many: We simply modeled geometry in Blender, exported our assets as FBX files and manually integrated them into Unity. The manual integration involved several steps:Setting up dynamic objects in the scene such as weapon pickups, spawn doors, capture pointsPlacing colliders to prevent players from walking or teleporting in certain areasSetting up invisible guides to allow bots to behave properlyEtc.This process can work well for smaller projects, but quickly becomes cumbersome as a project scales and evolves. When we started planning the development of our next title, we knew we were going to need a drastically improved workflow.Breachers is a competitive shooter with complex level layouts, subtler gameplay mechanics, more technical systems at play, and a higher level of graphical polish targeting the newest generation of standalone VR hardware. In terms of complexity, it goes several steps further than Hyper Dash, and we quickly felt the effects of this on our workflow.In the prototyping phase, we still relied heavily on Prefabs for dynamic objects, like window barricades for example. These are objects that we place inside window frames to block line of sight between interiors and the outside to prevent teams from seeing each other during the warm-up phase of the game.While testing our prototype, we were constantly moving around windows to improve gameplay, which meant changing geometry in Blender and re-exporting to Unity and then manually moving the barricade objects to match our changes. Many hours were spent flying around Unity’s Scene view, manually checking and fixing these kinds of things. Still, we had more than one playtest where we only noticed during gameplay that something had been overlooked.Obviously, this workflow was not going to give us the ability to quickly iterate on our map designs as we playtested, both internally and as part of our open alpha, where we planned to make one map available for free to get feedback from the community. We were looking forward to all that feedback, but not looking forward at all to the manual effort involved in applying it to our maps.Another potential downside to a Prefab-based design workflow is performance. We mainly target mobile, standalone VR headsets for our games. We want to push the visuals as far as we can, so we need to squeeze every last drop of performance out of our workflow.Assembling levels from Prefabs can be less efficient than creating a watertight mesh in a modeling program. If you snap two modular wall pieces together, you always have an unmerged loop of geometry in between them. With Prefabs, it’s also easy to end up placing a lot of geometry in your scene that isn’t visible (because it’s on the underside of an object, or placed against a wall) but still taking up valuable lightmap space. Over an entire level, those small inefficiencies can add up to wasted performance and diminished visuals.The final issue with Prefabs we want to mention is that it can be easy to break things by applying seemingly innocent changes to the source model in Blender, like renaming an object. As a game or level evolves, you often want to reorganize your assets and give them improved or more consistent names. But renaming an object in Blender and re-exporting it can easily (and without warning) break the overrides and additions made to the object in Unity, leading to regressions.In this simplified example, we have a ventilation grate Prefab and want smoke coming out of it. After importing the mesh into Unity, our artist has added the smoke particle system as a child object and added a surface type component to the Prefab to mark it as being a metal object.Here you can see what happens if we rename our mesh in Blender:When reimporting the mesh with the updated name, Unity can no longer find the old mesh by name, so it removes the object from the model Prefab. Children of this removed object are moved to the root of the Prefab and existing scripts are removed, again leading to manual cleanup work we’d rather avoid.As the prototyping phase for Breachers wrapped up and we prepared to go into full production mode in early 2022, our art and dev teams sat down together and investigated what we could do to remedy these problems. We defined clear goals for our ideal asset pipeline, one that would support the rapid and flexible iteration required for Breachers:All creation and modification of level geometry should happen in Blender.WYSIWYG: What a designer creates in Blender should match the result in Unity as closely as possible.When something is updated in Blender, importing the changes into Unity should happen automatically and not require any manual effort.As mentioned above, our main goal was to have an accurate visualization of the game in Blender – not only properly reflecting how the end result will look in Unity but also how the gameplay mechanics are set up. Gameplay in Breachers not only depends on a level’s layout, but also on dynamic objects (like breachable walls) and invisible elements (like sound volumes and colliders). We want to have all this information visible at the design stage and carried over precisely to Unity.Custom properties are critical to our workflow, and we assign these to objects in Blender. These are then carried over in Unity by the FBX format, so we can read them and run custom logic when our assets are imported into Unity.This gives us a great amount of flexibility, as well as stability. These properties stay connected to objects throughout the pipeline, so we can reorganize and rename things in our levels as much as we want without worrying about things breaking or getting out of sync.Unity has a powerful class called AssetPostprocessor, which allows modifications of assets while they are being imported. This is what we use at import time to parse those custom properties and act on them.Prefab linksWe have a custom property named PrefabLink, which tells Unity the object imported from Blender should be replaced by a Prefab already in the Unity project, while preserving the imported model’s transform. This allows us to place these dynamic objects in Blender while retaining the advantages of Prefabs once they are imported into Unity. The window barricades in the Blender scene above are a good example of this.Surface typesSurface definition is extremely important in Breachers. Walking on a metal staircase sounds different from walking on a concrete floor. Bullet penetration through wood is a lot different than through steel. And each surface type has its own impact effects. Going over each prop in Unity and tagging it as the correct surface type would be extremely time consuming, so we also tackle this at the design stage in Blender by setting custom properties on our geometry colliders.Static flagsAnother important setting for optimization are Unity’s static flags. Setting these correctly can have a profound impact on things like visibility culling, light baking, and batching. Using custom properties in Blender, we can set these on any part of the level, including reusable props, and have that information carry over into Unity across our levels.CollidersLastly, we’d like to share how we set up colliders. Unity has a simple but effective system that automatically detects level-of-detail variants for models when you postfix a model asset name with _LOD0, _LOD1, etc. We were inspired by this and created a similar system for colliders: By simply having geometry with _BoxCollider or _NoCollision in the name, we replace the meshes from Blender with colliders in Unity.As a concrete example, here is a snippet of our LevelSetupPostprocessor that reads custom properties and assigns the right static flags on each imported object:For all of this to work smoothly, we did have to do some work on the Blender side as well.Custom properties are a bit hidden in Blender’s UI and would require artists to manually type out the custom properties each time, which is not a great user experience. Relying on manual text entry would also be very error-prone, undoing much of the advantage of setting things up in Blender in the first place. Moving from a Prefab-based workflow into Blender also made us miss some of the advantages of Prefabs, like having a nice library of objects to browse through and pick from. Luckily, Blender, like Unity, is very flexible and easily extensible.The answer to the Prefab organization problem came in Blender 3.2 with Asset Libraries. This system acts a bit like the Prefab system in Unity: It allows you to create assets in a separate file and then import those into your Blender scene, while changes in the asset file reflect automatically in the Blender scene. Additionally, it ensures that any custom properties or colliders are correctly applied to each instance of this asset in Blender.For Blender, we wrote an in-house add-on to help set up the custom properties in a more clear user interface. This simplifies setting custom properties by just selecting the relevant Blender objects and hitting a button, instead of typing out each property manually.The Bundle Exporter add-on is an open source add-on that we’re using to export all of our FBX files in one click. We modified it to also work with custom properties and updated the UI to have faster exports for our specific needs.Setting up our level design workflow for Breachers took a large time investment initially, but we believe it was the right choice for the project. Also, it was kind of fun!As we’ve built out the game from initial blockouts through alpha testing and the months leading up to the final release, iterating on our levels has been quick and painless. We’ve been able to eliminate overhead and busywork for our designers and artists, while also transferring responsibilities to them that they previously would have needed a developer for.We have been impressed at both Unity and Blender for their ability to integrate with each other this smoothly, and we strongly believe this integration was critical to making Breachers a game we’re happy with and proud to share with the world.Thanks for reading, and enjoy the game!Triangle Factory’s Breachers is now available. Check out more blogs from Made with Unity developers here.
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  • Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning Review – Tom Cruise Fights the Big Goodbye

    The old school action movie hero, like the old school movie star, is a dying breed. Tom Cruise is acutely aware of this since pretty much all of his franchised efforts in the 2020s have been about the glories of the fading old days and ways. Top Gun: Maverick, for example, explained why we still needed Cruise up on that wall, protecting us with one piece of superb blockbuster cinema at a time. But in the interim between Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning and this month’s long anticipated Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, even the rare company he keeps on those ramparts has shrunk.
    Indiana Jones is again retired; and not only has James Bond died onscreen with the last of the Daniel Craig movies, but perhaps off as well since the franchise’s “one at a time” bespoke family business model was consigned to the dustbin of movie history.

    Still, there remains Cruise and his handful of beloved onscreen personas, who are only too cognizant of how lonely they are high up on their barricade against the rising tide. And it appears to at last be getting to them in Final Reckoning, the allegedly last Mission: Impossible movie that feels the weight of the world on its shoulders, and a lot less of the deft spontaneity that previously made this franchise among the best in the Hollywood canon.
    Just to clear, there is yet quite a bit to enjoy in Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, our eighth and most interconnected adventure with Cruise’s Ethan Hunt to date. Ever since filmmaker Christopher McQuarrie took over the directorial duties of the franchise beginning in 2015’s Rogue Nation, and even beforehand as a writer via Ghost Protocol, the series has widely been recognized for its creative ingenuity, emotional intelligence, and of course eye-popping spectacle and stunt work wherein Cruise channels his inner Buster Keaton or Douglas Fairbanks by putting his life on the line for our amusement.

    Those elements stay at play in Final Reckoning, but there is just a lot less playfulness to it in a film that ostensibly asks us to treat its story as a grand finale to Ethan Hunt’s impact on cinema—even as the film simultaneously and awkwardly resists that impulse. Less of a full-stop for the series than a trailing off question mark, Final Reckoning fights against itself and the notion of closing the book or bidding farewell to almost anything, especially Cruise, which makes its ever-growing bombast as much of a hindrance as help in this reluctant swan song.
    From the opening recap of his assignment, wherein Ethan receives the choice to accept or decline his mission via an appropriately ‘90s VHS cassette tape, Final Reckoning is intent on celebrating the past while turning the screws of self-importance in the present. Consider that this time Ethan’s mission brief is delivered not only by a familiar voice, but the newly elected President of the United States. The former CIA director turned commander-in-chief is heard pleading with Ethan to come in and deliver the cruciform key from the last movie, which is the secret to unlocking the source code to a world-ending AI threat called the Entity.
    Yes, despite the title change, Final Reckoning is very much Dead Reckoning Part 2, albeit now with the stakes clearly having been tinkered with off-screen. In the last movie, the Entity represented the abstract but insidious threat of AI and the internet itself, with a sentient algorithm commandeering the power to shape truth and our perceptions of reality. Well, in Final Reckoning, it has apparently decided to go full Skynet. President Sloane reveals the evil AI has corrupted the hydrogen bomb capabilities of most of the nuclear powers in the world, and within three days will have the ability to destroy all life on Earth for no discernible reason. However, should Ethan go rogue and attempt to turn off the Entity without surrendering control over the AI’s source code back to the American government, it could kill the internet and plummet the world into an economic dark age.
    It’s grim, technologically complex stuff, but in practice is actually incredibly simple. The world will literally end if either the Entity or any government gets its way. So it is all up to Ethan Hunt and his beloved team—which consists here of Luther, Benji, and recent additions Graceand Paris—to save the world via some spectacularly unsafe looking stunts and poker-faced brinksmanship. Ethan indeed has to enter into multiple staring contests with various admirals, generals, and presidents when they dare question whether he really is the smartest guy in the room. The fools.
    However, for all the press about this being the most expensive Mission ever made, Final Reckoning is arguably more intimate in scale than the last couple of entries. There is plenty of globe-trotting, but other than a jaw-dropping climax involving two biplanes that wouldn’t have looked out of place in 1933’s Flying Down to Rio, and the long teased underwater sequence in which Ethan discovers the wrecked SevastopolTop Gun territory. As in Maverick, Cruise once again has steely tete-a-tetes with various naval officers on what appears to be the real frigid waters of the Bering Sea.
    This unfortunately undercuts a bit of the travelogue fun of so many spy movies, including the previous Dead Reckoning which was at its best when Cruise and Atwell got to flirt in Rome while smashing a banana-colored Fiat along the Spanish Steps, or Cruise and the missed-but-not-forgotten Rebecca Ferguson simply smoldered in the Arabian deserts outside Dubai while trashing an army of NPCs.

    In an attempt to reach for the rhapsody of other blockbuster swan songs like The Dark Knight Rises or No Time to Die, Final Reckoning foregoes the lighter touch and mischievousness that made Fallout and Rogue Nation such all-time crowdpleasers. Yet McQuarrie’s play-it-by-ear looseness and story structure clashes with the dour-faced histrionics of Final Reckoning’s setup, particularly during the film’s multiple exposition dumps where characters spew utter nonsense about what the Entity wants at each other, or what to do about what remains one of the worst villains in the franchise, Esai Morales’ exhausting Gabriel. He’s back, and his cackling dastardliness is louder than ever. It also still feels beneath the amount of emotional trauma the film wishes to credit him with inflicting on Ethan.

    Join our mailing list
    Get the best of Den of Geek delivered right to your inbox!

    Still, it would be a disservice to what is ultimately an entertaining popcorn flick to dwell only on the shortcomings. This remains a Tom Cruise stunt spectacular that for the most part maintains McQuarrie’s uncanny ear for sharp, knowingly grandiloquent dialogue and clever shorthand characterization. When Cruise and McQ are focused on the smaller beats, like the interplay between Ethan and a team of deep sea divers, or the endlessly endearing bickering between teammates like Benji and Luther, it never ceases to charm. Grace and Paris likewise prove worthy permanent additions to the team. The chemistry between Atwell and Cruise during one arctic sequence is particularly giddy.
    Furthermore, there is a wonderful callback to the first Mission: Impossible that I will not spoil here, but it’s better than any simple cameo or easter egg. It retroactively adds McQuarrie’s humanist optimism from these later movies to De Palma’s ‘90s era cheeky chic. And did I mention that IMAX biplane sequence that’s all over the trailers and posters? It really cannot be oversold.
    It’s only when the sum of these sequences are compared to the taller heights the franchise has recently scaled, particularly in Fallout, which Final Reckoning not so covertly attempts to remake during the third act, that it’s left a little wanting. The film might be marketed as the final Mission: Impossible
    Mission: Impossible: The Final Reckoning opens on Friday, May 23. Learn more about Den of Geek’s review process and why you can trust our recommendations here.
    #mission #impossible #final #reckoning #review
    Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning Review – Tom Cruise Fights the Big Goodbye
    The old school action movie hero, like the old school movie star, is a dying breed. Tom Cruise is acutely aware of this since pretty much all of his franchised efforts in the 2020s have been about the glories of the fading old days and ways. Top Gun: Maverick, for example, explained why we still needed Cruise up on that wall, protecting us with one piece of superb blockbuster cinema at a time. But in the interim between Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning and this month’s long anticipated Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, even the rare company he keeps on those ramparts has shrunk. Indiana Jones is again retired; and not only has James Bond died onscreen with the last of the Daniel Craig movies, but perhaps off as well since the franchise’s “one at a time” bespoke family business model was consigned to the dustbin of movie history. Still, there remains Cruise and his handful of beloved onscreen personas, who are only too cognizant of how lonely they are high up on their barricade against the rising tide. And it appears to at last be getting to them in Final Reckoning, the allegedly last Mission: Impossible movie that feels the weight of the world on its shoulders, and a lot less of the deft spontaneity that previously made this franchise among the best in the Hollywood canon. Just to clear, there is yet quite a bit to enjoy in Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, our eighth and most interconnected adventure with Cruise’s Ethan Hunt to date. Ever since filmmaker Christopher McQuarrie took over the directorial duties of the franchise beginning in 2015’s Rogue Nation, and even beforehand as a writer via Ghost Protocol, the series has widely been recognized for its creative ingenuity, emotional intelligence, and of course eye-popping spectacle and stunt work wherein Cruise channels his inner Buster Keaton or Douglas Fairbanks by putting his life on the line for our amusement. Those elements stay at play in Final Reckoning, but there is just a lot less playfulness to it in a film that ostensibly asks us to treat its story as a grand finale to Ethan Hunt’s impact on cinema—even as the film simultaneously and awkwardly resists that impulse. Less of a full-stop for the series than a trailing off question mark, Final Reckoning fights against itself and the notion of closing the book or bidding farewell to almost anything, especially Cruise, which makes its ever-growing bombast as much of a hindrance as help in this reluctant swan song. From the opening recap of his assignment, wherein Ethan receives the choice to accept or decline his mission via an appropriately ‘90s VHS cassette tape, Final Reckoning is intent on celebrating the past while turning the screws of self-importance in the present. Consider that this time Ethan’s mission brief is delivered not only by a familiar voice, but the newly elected President of the United States. The former CIA director turned commander-in-chief is heard pleading with Ethan to come in and deliver the cruciform key from the last movie, which is the secret to unlocking the source code to a world-ending AI threat called the Entity. Yes, despite the title change, Final Reckoning is very much Dead Reckoning Part 2, albeit now with the stakes clearly having been tinkered with off-screen. In the last movie, the Entity represented the abstract but insidious threat of AI and the internet itself, with a sentient algorithm commandeering the power to shape truth and our perceptions of reality. Well, in Final Reckoning, it has apparently decided to go full Skynet. President Sloane reveals the evil AI has corrupted the hydrogen bomb capabilities of most of the nuclear powers in the world, and within three days will have the ability to destroy all life on Earth for no discernible reason. However, should Ethan go rogue and attempt to turn off the Entity without surrendering control over the AI’s source code back to the American government, it could kill the internet and plummet the world into an economic dark age. It’s grim, technologically complex stuff, but in practice is actually incredibly simple. The world will literally end if either the Entity or any government gets its way. So it is all up to Ethan Hunt and his beloved team—which consists here of Luther, Benji, and recent additions Graceand Paris—to save the world via some spectacularly unsafe looking stunts and poker-faced brinksmanship. Ethan indeed has to enter into multiple staring contests with various admirals, generals, and presidents when they dare question whether he really is the smartest guy in the room. The fools. However, for all the press about this being the most expensive Mission ever made, Final Reckoning is arguably more intimate in scale than the last couple of entries. There is plenty of globe-trotting, but other than a jaw-dropping climax involving two biplanes that wouldn’t have looked out of place in 1933’s Flying Down to Rio, and the long teased underwater sequence in which Ethan discovers the wrecked SevastopolTop Gun territory. As in Maverick, Cruise once again has steely tete-a-tetes with various naval officers on what appears to be the real frigid waters of the Bering Sea. This unfortunately undercuts a bit of the travelogue fun of so many spy movies, including the previous Dead Reckoning which was at its best when Cruise and Atwell got to flirt in Rome while smashing a banana-colored Fiat along the Spanish Steps, or Cruise and the missed-but-not-forgotten Rebecca Ferguson simply smoldered in the Arabian deserts outside Dubai while trashing an army of NPCs. In an attempt to reach for the rhapsody of other blockbuster swan songs like The Dark Knight Rises or No Time to Die, Final Reckoning foregoes the lighter touch and mischievousness that made Fallout and Rogue Nation such all-time crowdpleasers. Yet McQuarrie’s play-it-by-ear looseness and story structure clashes with the dour-faced histrionics of Final Reckoning’s setup, particularly during the film’s multiple exposition dumps where characters spew utter nonsense about what the Entity wants at each other, or what to do about what remains one of the worst villains in the franchise, Esai Morales’ exhausting Gabriel. He’s back, and his cackling dastardliness is louder than ever. It also still feels beneath the amount of emotional trauma the film wishes to credit him with inflicting on Ethan. Join our mailing list Get the best of Den of Geek delivered right to your inbox! Still, it would be a disservice to what is ultimately an entertaining popcorn flick to dwell only on the shortcomings. This remains a Tom Cruise stunt spectacular that for the most part maintains McQuarrie’s uncanny ear for sharp, knowingly grandiloquent dialogue and clever shorthand characterization. When Cruise and McQ are focused on the smaller beats, like the interplay between Ethan and a team of deep sea divers, or the endlessly endearing bickering between teammates like Benji and Luther, it never ceases to charm. Grace and Paris likewise prove worthy permanent additions to the team. The chemistry between Atwell and Cruise during one arctic sequence is particularly giddy. Furthermore, there is a wonderful callback to the first Mission: Impossible that I will not spoil here, but it’s better than any simple cameo or easter egg. It retroactively adds McQuarrie’s humanist optimism from these later movies to De Palma’s ‘90s era cheeky chic. And did I mention that IMAX biplane sequence that’s all over the trailers and posters? It really cannot be oversold. It’s only when the sum of these sequences are compared to the taller heights the franchise has recently scaled, particularly in Fallout, which Final Reckoning not so covertly attempts to remake during the third act, that it’s left a little wanting. The film might be marketed as the final Mission: Impossible Mission: Impossible: The Final Reckoning opens on Friday, May 23. Learn more about Den of Geek’s review process and why you can trust our recommendations here. #mission #impossible #final #reckoning #review
    WWW.DENOFGEEK.COM
    Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning Review – Tom Cruise Fights the Big Goodbye
    The old school action movie hero, like the old school movie star, is a dying breed. Tom Cruise is acutely aware of this since pretty much all of his franchised efforts in the 2020s have been about the glories of the fading old days and ways. Top Gun: Maverick, for example, explained why we still needed Cruise up on that wall, protecting us with one piece of superb blockbuster cinema at a time. But in the interim between Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning and this month’s long anticipated Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, even the rare company he keeps on those ramparts has shrunk. Indiana Jones is again retired (and presumably for good after the box office receipts for Dial of Destiny came in); and not only has James Bond died onscreen with the last of the Daniel Craig movies, but perhaps off as well since the franchise’s “one at a time” bespoke family business model was consigned to the dustbin of movie history. Still, there remains Cruise and his handful of beloved onscreen personas, who are only too cognizant of how lonely they are high up on their barricade against the rising tide. And it appears to at last be getting to them in Final Reckoning, the allegedly last Mission: Impossible movie that feels the weight of the world on its shoulders, and a lot less of the deft spontaneity that previously made this franchise among the best in the Hollywood canon. Just to clear, there is yet quite a bit to enjoy in Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, our eighth and most interconnected adventure with Cruise’s Ethan Hunt to date. Ever since filmmaker Christopher McQuarrie took over the directorial duties of the franchise beginning in 2015’s Rogue Nation, and even beforehand as a writer via Ghost Protocol, the series has widely been recognized for its creative ingenuity, emotional intelligence, and of course eye-popping spectacle and stunt work wherein Cruise channels his inner Buster Keaton or Douglas Fairbanks by putting his life on the line for our amusement. Those elements stay at play in Final Reckoning, but there is just a lot less playfulness to it in a film that ostensibly asks us to treat its story as a grand finale to Ethan Hunt’s impact on cinema—even as the film simultaneously and awkwardly resists that impulse. Less of a full-stop for the series than a trailing off question mark, Final Reckoning fights against itself and the notion of closing the book or bidding farewell to almost anything, especially Cruise, which makes its ever-growing bombast as much of a hindrance as help in this reluctant swan song. From the opening recap of his assignment, wherein Ethan receives the choice to accept or decline his mission via an appropriately ‘90s VHS cassette tape, Final Reckoning is intent on celebrating the past while turning the screws of self-importance in the present. Consider that this time Ethan’s mission brief is delivered not only by a familiar voice, but the newly elected President of the United States (Angela Bassett’s welcome return as Erika Sloane). The former CIA director turned commander-in-chief is heard pleading with Ethan to come in and deliver the cruciform key from the last movie, which is the secret to unlocking the source code to a world-ending AI threat called the Entity. Yes, despite the title change, Final Reckoning is very much Dead Reckoning Part 2, albeit now with the stakes clearly having been tinkered with off-screen. In the last movie, the Entity represented the abstract but insidious threat of AI and the internet itself, with a sentient algorithm commandeering the power to shape truth and our perceptions of reality. Well, in Final Reckoning, it has apparently decided to go full Skynet. President Sloane reveals the evil AI has corrupted the hydrogen bomb capabilities of most of the nuclear powers in the world, and within three days will have the ability to destroy all life on Earth for no discernible reason. However, should Ethan go rogue and attempt to turn off the Entity without surrendering control over the AI’s source code back to the American government, it could kill the internet and plummet the world into an economic dark age. It’s grim, technologically complex stuff, but in practice is actually incredibly simple. The world will literally end if either the Entity or any government gets its way. So it is all up to Ethan Hunt and his beloved team—which consists here of Luther (Ving Rhames), Benji (Simon Pegg), and recent additions Grace (Hayley Atwell) and Paris (Pom Klementieff)—to save the world via some spectacularly unsafe looking stunts and poker-faced brinksmanship. Ethan indeed has to enter into multiple staring contests with various admirals, generals, and presidents when they dare question whether he really is the smartest guy in the room. The fools. However, for all the press about this being the most expensive Mission ever made, Final Reckoning is arguably more intimate in scale than the last couple of entries. There is plenty of globe-trotting, but other than a jaw-dropping climax involving two biplanes that wouldn’t have looked out of place in 1933’s Flying Down to Rio, and the long teased underwater sequence in which Ethan discovers the wrecked SevastopolTop Gun territory. As in Maverick, Cruise once again has steely tete-a-tetes with various naval officers on what appears to be the real frigid waters of the Bering Sea. This unfortunately undercuts a bit of the travelogue fun of so many spy movies, including the previous Dead Reckoning which was at its best when Cruise and Atwell got to flirt in Rome while smashing a banana-colored Fiat along the Spanish Steps, or Cruise and the missed-but-not-forgotten Rebecca Ferguson simply smoldered in the Arabian deserts outside Dubai while trashing an army of NPCs. In an attempt to reach for the rhapsody of other blockbuster swan songs like The Dark Knight Rises or No Time to Die, Final Reckoning foregoes the lighter touch and mischievousness that made Fallout and Rogue Nation such all-time crowdpleasers. Yet McQuarrie’s play-it-by-ear looseness and story structure clashes with the dour-faced histrionics of Final Reckoning’s setup, particularly during the film’s multiple exposition dumps where characters spew utter nonsense about what the Entity wants at each other, or what to do about what remains one of the worst villains in the franchise, Esai Morales’ exhausting Gabriel. He’s back, and his cackling dastardliness is louder than ever. It also still feels beneath the amount of emotional trauma the film wishes to credit him with inflicting on Ethan. Join our mailing list Get the best of Den of Geek delivered right to your inbox! Still, it would be a disservice to what is ultimately an entertaining popcorn flick to dwell only on the shortcomings. This remains a Tom Cruise stunt spectacular that for the most part maintains McQuarrie’s uncanny ear for sharp, knowingly grandiloquent dialogue and clever shorthand characterization. When Cruise and McQ are focused on the smaller beats, like the interplay between Ethan and a team of deep sea divers, or the endlessly endearing bickering between teammates like Benji and Luther, it never ceases to charm. Grace and Paris likewise prove worthy permanent additions to the team. The chemistry between Atwell and Cruise during one arctic sequence is particularly giddy. Furthermore, there is a wonderful callback to the first Mission: Impossible that I will not spoil here, but it’s better than any simple cameo or easter egg. It retroactively adds McQuarrie’s humanist optimism from these later movies to De Palma’s ‘90s era cheeky chic. And did I mention that IMAX biplane sequence that’s all over the trailers and posters? It really cannot be oversold. It’s only when the sum of these sequences are compared to the taller heights the franchise has recently scaled, particularly in Fallout, which Final Reckoning not so covertly attempts to remake during the third act, that it’s left a little wanting. The film might be marketed as the final Mission: Impossible Mission: Impossible: The Final Reckoning opens on Friday, May 23. Learn more about Den of Geek’s review process and why you can trust our recommendations here.
    0 Commentarii 0 Distribuiri 0 previzualizare
  • #333;">By Shoving a Bed Frame Against the Door, This Pompeii Family Tried to Survive Mount Vesuvius' Eruption

    New Research
    By Shoving a Bed Frame Against the Door, This Pompeii Family Tried to Survive Mount Vesuvius’ Eruption
    Archaeologists are learning new details about the four individuals’ futile attempt to hide inside an ancient residence called the House of Helle and Phrixus

    A bed frame shoved against the door served as a makeshift barricade.
    Pompeii Archaeological Park
    In 79 C.E., Mount Vesuvius erupted, spewing ash and small volcanic pellets known as lapilli over the city of Pompeii.
    Nearly 1,950 years later, archaeologists are still sifting through the layers of debris and making remarkable discoveries about life—and death—in the ancient city.
    Researchers recently discovered four members of a family, including a child, who attempted to escape the eruption by barricading themselves inside a bedroom, according to a statement from the Pompeii Archaeological Park.
    Though their efforts were futile, their remains provide remarkable insight into the doomed city’s final moments.
    When the eruption began, most residents of Pompeii “had no clue what was happening,” Gabriel Zuchtriegel, director of the park and co-author of a new study published in the journal Scavi di Pompei, tells the New York Times’ Sara Novak.
    “Many thought the end of the world had come.”
    A majority of the 15,000 to 20,000 residents of Pompeii and nearby Herculaneum fled and survived the eruption.
    The four family members were among the roughly 2,000 Pompeians who remained when the city was destroyed.

    As Helle struggles in the sea, Phrixus reaches out to his sister from atop a flying ram.


    Pompeii Archaeological Park
    Archaeologists found the family’s remains in a small but stately residence known as the House of Helle and Phrixus, named after a fresco of the mythological siblings discovered on the dining room wall.
    In Greek myth, the siblings survive their stepmother’s attempt to sacrifice them to the gods by flying away on a ram with a golden fleece.
    While Phrixus escapes, Helle falls off the ram into the sea.
    The fresco captures the siblings reaching out to each other—Helle in the sea, Phrixus on the ram—in a fittingly futile attempt at rescue.
    The architectural features of the house may have accelerated the family’s demise.
    Like many Roman houses, the House of Helle and Phrixus featured an open-roofed atrium, intended to aid rainwater collection.
    But as lapilli fell from the sky during the first phase of the eruption, the rock debris, which reached up to nine feet in some locations, quickly flooded the house through the atrium.
    At first, the archaeological evidence shows, the four individuals tried to protect themselves by packing into a small room.
    They even pushed a wooden bed frame against the door, hoping that it would prevent the lapilli from entering.When that failed, the researchers think they pulled back the barricade and attempted to escape.
    Based on the location of the remains, they only got as far as the triclinium, or dining room.
    “This house, with its decorations and its objects, shows us people who tried to save themselves,” says Zuchtriegel in the statement, per a translation by La Brújula Verde’s Guillermo Carvajal.
    “They didn’t succeed, but their story is still here, beneath the ashes.”
    Over the centuries, the ash preserved the remains of the family, the wooden bed frame and other items, including a bronze amulet known as a bulla and a stash of amphorae filled with garum, a popular Roman fish sauce.

    Ash and lapilli flooded into through the open-roofed atrium, burying the house in up to nine feet of debris.


    Pompeii Archaeological Park
    Researchers don’t know that this particular family owned the House of Helle and Phrixus.
    The group may have taken refuge there after the owners fled, as Marcello Mogetta, an archaeologist and Roman art historian at the University of Missouri who wasn’t involved in the study, tells the Times.
    Still, the recovered objects offer a glimpse into Pompeian family life.
    For instance, the child was likely the one wearing the bronze bulla, as tradition dictated that boys wear such amulets for protection until adulthood.
    Additionally, traces of masonry materials suggest that the house was under renovation.
    As Zuchtriegel says in the statement, “Excavating Pompeii means confronting the beauty of art, but also the fragility of life.”
    Get the latest stories in your inbox every weekday.
    #0066cc;">#shoving #bed #frame #against #the #door #this #pompeii #family #tried #survive #mount #vesuvius039 #eruption #new #researchby #vesuvius #eruptionarchaeologists #are #learning #details #about #four #individuals #futile #attempt #hide #inside #ancient #residence #called #house #helle #and #phrixus #shoved #served #makeshift #barricade #archaeological #parkin #vesuviuserupted #spewing #ash #small #volcanic #pellets #known #aslapilli #over #city #ofpompeiinearly #years #later #archaeologists #still #sifting #through #layers #debris #making #remarkable #discoveries #lifeand #deathin #cityresearchers #recently #discovered #members #including #child #who #attempted #escape #barricading #themselves #bedroom #according #astatement #from #thepompeii #parkthough #their #efforts #were #remains #provide #insight #into #doomed #citys #final #momentswhen #began #most #residents #had #clue #what #was #happeninggabriel #zuchtriegel #director #park #coauthor #study #published #journalscavi #pompei #tells #thenew #york #times #sara #novakmany #thought #end #world #comea #majority #nearby #herculaneumfled #survived #eruptionthe #among #roughly #pompeians #remained #when #destroyed #struggles #seaphrixus #reaches #out #his #sister #atop #flying #ram #parkarchaeologists #found #familys #but #stately #named #after #afresco #mythological #siblings #dining #room #wallin #greek #myth #stepmothers #sacrifice #them #gods #away #with #golden #fleecewhile #escapes #falls #off #seathe #fresco #captures #reaching #each #otherhelle #sea #ramin #fittingly #rescuethe #architectural #features #may #have #accelerated #demiselike #many #roman #houses #featured #openroofed #atrium #intended #aid #rainwater #collectionbut #lapilli #fell #sky #during #first #phase #rock #which #reached #nine #feet #some #locations #quickly #flooded #atriumat #evidence #shows #protect #packing #roomthey #even #pushed #wooden #hoping #that #would #prevent #enteringwhen #failed #researchers #think #they #pulled #back #escapebased #location #only #got #far #triclinium #roomthis #its #decorations #objects #people #save #says #statement #per #translation #byla #brújula #verdes #guillermo #carvajalthey #didnt #succeed #story #here #beneath #ashesover #centuries #preserved #other #items #bronze #amulet #abulla #stash #amphorae #filled #garum #apopular #fish #sauce #burying #parkresearchers #dont #know #particular #owned #phrixusthe #group #taken #refuge #there #owners #fled #marcello #mogetta #archaeologist #art #historian #university #missouri #wasnt #involved #timesstill #recovered #offer #glimpse #pompeian #lifefor #instance #likely #one #wearing #bulla #tradition #dictated #boys #wear #such #amulets #for #protection #until #adulthoodadditionally #traces #masonry #materials #suggest #under #renovationas #excavating #means #confronting #beauty #also #fragility #lifeget #latest #stories #your #inbox #every #weekday
    By Shoving a Bed Frame Against the Door, This Pompeii Family Tried to Survive Mount Vesuvius' Eruption
    New Research By Shoving a Bed Frame Against the Door, This Pompeii Family Tried to Survive Mount Vesuvius’ Eruption Archaeologists are learning new details about the four individuals’ futile attempt to hide inside an ancient residence called the House of Helle and Phrixus A bed frame shoved against the door served as a makeshift barricade. Pompeii Archaeological Park In 79 C.E., Mount Vesuvius erupted, spewing ash and small volcanic pellets known as lapilli over the city of Pompeii. Nearly 1,950 years later, archaeologists are still sifting through the layers of debris and making remarkable discoveries about life—and death—in the ancient city. Researchers recently discovered four members of a family, including a child, who attempted to escape the eruption by barricading themselves inside a bedroom, according to a statement from the Pompeii Archaeological Park. Though their efforts were futile, their remains provide remarkable insight into the doomed city’s final moments. When the eruption began, most residents of Pompeii “had no clue what was happening,” Gabriel Zuchtriegel, director of the park and co-author of a new study published in the journal Scavi di Pompei, tells the New York Times’ Sara Novak. “Many thought the end of the world had come.” A majority of the 15,000 to 20,000 residents of Pompeii and nearby Herculaneum fled and survived the eruption. The four family members were among the roughly 2,000 Pompeians who remained when the city was destroyed. As Helle struggles in the sea, Phrixus reaches out to his sister from atop a flying ram. Pompeii Archaeological Park Archaeologists found the family’s remains in a small but stately residence known as the House of Helle and Phrixus, named after a fresco of the mythological siblings discovered on the dining room wall. In Greek myth, the siblings survive their stepmother’s attempt to sacrifice them to the gods by flying away on a ram with a golden fleece. While Phrixus escapes, Helle falls off the ram into the sea. The fresco captures the siblings reaching out to each other—Helle in the sea, Phrixus on the ram—in a fittingly futile attempt at rescue. The architectural features of the house may have accelerated the family’s demise. Like many Roman houses, the House of Helle and Phrixus featured an open-roofed atrium, intended to aid rainwater collection. But as lapilli fell from the sky during the first phase of the eruption, the rock debris, which reached up to nine feet in some locations, quickly flooded the house through the atrium. At first, the archaeological evidence shows, the four individuals tried to protect themselves by packing into a small room. They even pushed a wooden bed frame against the door, hoping that it would prevent the lapilli from entering.When that failed, the researchers think they pulled back the barricade and attempted to escape. Based on the location of the remains, they only got as far as the triclinium, or dining room. “This house, with its decorations and its objects, shows us people who tried to save themselves,” says Zuchtriegel in the statement, per a translation by La Brújula Verde’s Guillermo Carvajal. “They didn’t succeed, but their story is still here, beneath the ashes.” Over the centuries, the ash preserved the remains of the family, the wooden bed frame and other items, including a bronze amulet known as a bulla and a stash of amphorae filled with garum, a popular Roman fish sauce. Ash and lapilli flooded into through the open-roofed atrium, burying the house in up to nine feet of debris. Pompeii Archaeological Park Researchers don’t know that this particular family owned the House of Helle and Phrixus. The group may have taken refuge there after the owners fled, as Marcello Mogetta, an archaeologist and Roman art historian at the University of Missouri who wasn’t involved in the study, tells the Times. Still, the recovered objects offer a glimpse into Pompeian family life. For instance, the child was likely the one wearing the bronze bulla, as tradition dictated that boys wear such amulets for protection until adulthood. Additionally, traces of masonry materials suggest that the house was under renovation. As Zuchtriegel says in the statement, “Excavating Pompeii means confronting the beauty of art, but also the fragility of life.” Get the latest stories in your inbox every weekday.
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    By Shoving a Bed Frame Against the Door, This Pompeii Family Tried to Survive Mount Vesuvius' Eruption
    New Research By Shoving a Bed Frame Against the Door, This Pompeii Family Tried to Survive Mount Vesuvius’ Eruption Archaeologists are learning new details about the four individuals’ futile attempt to hide inside an ancient residence called the House of Helle and Phrixus A bed frame shoved against the door served as a makeshift barricade. Pompeii Archaeological Park In 79 C.E., Mount Vesuvius erupted, spewing ash and small volcanic pellets known as lapilli over the city of Pompeii. Nearly 1,950 years later, archaeologists are still sifting through the layers of debris and making remarkable discoveries about life—and death—in the ancient city. Researchers recently discovered four members of a family, including a child, who attempted to escape the eruption by barricading themselves inside a bedroom, according to a statement from the Pompeii Archaeological Park. Though their efforts were futile, their remains provide remarkable insight into the doomed city’s final moments. When the eruption began, most residents of Pompeii “had no clue what was happening,” Gabriel Zuchtriegel, director of the park and co-author of a new study published in the journal Scavi di Pompei, tells the New York Times’ Sara Novak. “Many thought the end of the world had come.” A majority of the 15,000 to 20,000 residents of Pompeii and nearby Herculaneum fled and survived the eruption. The four family members were among the roughly 2,000 Pompeians who remained when the city was destroyed. As Helle struggles in the sea, Phrixus reaches out to his sister from atop a flying ram. Pompeii Archaeological Park Archaeologists found the family’s remains in a small but stately residence known as the House of Helle and Phrixus, named after a fresco of the mythological siblings discovered on the dining room wall. In Greek myth, the siblings survive their stepmother’s attempt to sacrifice them to the gods by flying away on a ram with a golden fleece. While Phrixus escapes, Helle falls off the ram into the sea. The fresco captures the siblings reaching out to each other—Helle in the sea, Phrixus on the ram—in a fittingly futile attempt at rescue. The architectural features of the house may have accelerated the family’s demise. Like many Roman houses, the House of Helle and Phrixus featured an open-roofed atrium, intended to aid rainwater collection. But as lapilli fell from the sky during the first phase of the eruption, the rock debris, which reached up to nine feet in some locations, quickly flooded the house through the atrium. At first, the archaeological evidence shows, the four individuals tried to protect themselves by packing into a small room. They even pushed a wooden bed frame against the door, hoping that it would prevent the lapilli from entering.When that failed, the researchers think they pulled back the barricade and attempted to escape. Based on the location of the remains, they only got as far as the triclinium, or dining room. “This house, with its decorations and its objects, shows us people who tried to save themselves,” says Zuchtriegel in the statement, per a translation by La Brújula Verde’s Guillermo Carvajal. “They didn’t succeed, but their story is still here, beneath the ashes.” Over the centuries, the ash preserved the remains of the family, the wooden bed frame and other items, including a bronze amulet known as a bulla and a stash of amphorae filled with garum, a popular Roman fish sauce. Ash and lapilli flooded into through the open-roofed atrium, burying the house in up to nine feet of debris. Pompeii Archaeological Park Researchers don’t know that this particular family owned the House of Helle and Phrixus. The group may have taken refuge there after the owners fled, as Marcello Mogetta, an archaeologist and Roman art historian at the University of Missouri who wasn’t involved in the study, tells the Times. Still, the recovered objects offer a glimpse into Pompeian family life. For instance, the child was likely the one wearing the bronze bulla, as tradition dictated that boys wear such amulets for protection until adulthood. Additionally, traces of masonry materials suggest that the house was under renovation. As Zuchtriegel says in the statement, “Excavating Pompeii means confronting the beauty of art, but also the fragility of life.” Get the latest stories in your inbox every weekday.
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